migrant struggles – somebody else's paradise

highlander

we got very lucky this time. it’s around noon when we arrive at the Highlander Research and Education Center – a place that people whom maggie encountered in her journey through Appalachia had spoken highly of. by the time we drove into New Market, just north of Knoxville, yesterday, it was dark, and our attempt to find the Highlander made us go in circles. we also knew that, even if we would have found it, chances to find the center open on a Friday night were slim.

we reach the center at noon today and are impressed by the immense beauty of the landscape. the office does look closed. but wait, there’s one other car and when we knock on the door Tufara shows up. she wasn’t supposed to be there, she insists, but you know how it goes with these kinds of social justice jobs… Tufara is just a wonderful delightful presence who tells us tales about the Highlander and the world. she’s a coordinator for the art and youth programs, and emphasizes how important it is that all the projects have an culture and youth dimension. and she tells us about the African caravan from South Africa to Nairobi, for the World Social Forum, that she’s part of.

trying to understand how the Highlander is connected to its environment, i like how she distinguishes neighbors and community. it comes as no surprise that the relationship with many of the immediate neighbors, after all these years, is full of tensions and hostility. we had a brief taste of the disconnection when we stopped at a bar on the road to ask directions. the woman behind the counter wasn’t sure, and a guy hanging around looked at us with suspicion when we told him what we were looking for. “The private club?” he asked, which made us want to make sure that we’re talking about the same place. an opportunity to poke a bit into his vision of the place – “so what do they do there?” a vile laugh and evasive respons, “well, you’ll just have to use your imagination about the things that go on there.” and Tufara tells us about the time she a dental emergency which forced her to go to the local dentist. while he was putting all the instruments in her mouth, he asked where she was from. (apparently a black woman could not be from ‘here’.) Alabama. “Good, i’m gonna fix you up so you can go back there.”

a widespread and well rooted racism that is so much part of the landscape here. on a number of occasions while driving through this landschape, and usually just after a sensation of beauty, the thought came to me that this is the land where the KuKluxKlan emerged. when looking through indymedia Tennessee before coming, i read reports of an intensification of racist actions in the region, this time specifically against new latino migrants – from actions to ban spanish (and spanish books from the library) to putting a burning cross in the yard of the home of a latino family.

yet then Tufara speaks of the Highlander’s community – some folks in the neighborhood (and with great enthousiasm she’s the godmother of a local girl), many goups in Knoxville and around (too many to start naming them, she says), groups in Tennessee, in the South, in the rest of the country. all kinds of organizations for social justice, poor people’s struggles. the current focus is bringing together white poor folks of Appalachia, black folks from the south and new latino immigrant communities in these regions.

the Highlander is all but an island, it is a node in a dense network of social justice groups. it functions as a place where people and groups gather and work together – they connect, strategize collectively, build networks and campaigns. it is a place of resources and peace to work, but it is clear that whatever takes place here, is meant to be taken (back) to other places.

Tufara also gets other people to come and meet us. Amber, an intern, and Pam, the director. a cup of coffee in the kitchen of the office. i’m impressed by the humanity that speaks through Tufara. when she talks about checking the stories she wants to tell about social justice with her grandma, to know if they are comprehensible. or about bringing together the older folk music people and the young hip-hop kids in a way that they understand why it is important to listen to each other. and when she talks about new orleans – about how the discourses about the opportunity for new ways of organizing, a discourse that i know from in the Bay Area, forgets that it’s about human lives.

Pam takes us around to show the place. the view on the Smokey Mountains is amazing. the house were most of the education takes place. the best idea of the world: the chairs set up in a circle in the big meeting room, are rocking chairs. just imagine how different a meeting must be if everyone is in a rocking chair… a dormitory pavilion with one sleeping room in particular where the beds are aligned with a hugh window opening up to the Smokies. the library pavilion full of precious resources, including a section with the original (marxist) books from when the Highlander was started in 1932. and a small house on the top of the hill, with a working and sleeping room for about 7 people. the board had decided that this spot would remain open but then one day they found that Myles Horton, who started the center, had build the house. imagine the work that one can get done here…

this weekend turns out to be one of the few without a workshop or meeting, so we don’t get to see the Highlander in action. but the gift of having this space for us…

running around in the grass, watching the colours in the sky, mountains and fog as the light fades away – from green and pink, and lots of purple. wandering through the house and reading the posters. an image of a campaign denouncing Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the “communist training school” that is the Highlander. Tufara also told us it had been denounced as a place with lesbians. but of course the most scandalous of all was the mixing of black and white people during the civil rights ear.

we go to New Market, to get food to cook for our hosts. while driving through this area we had already noted the presence of money. hills spread with houses and barns and meadows like in the Columbia area of two days ago, but new, big, houses inbetween. New Market is clearly developing. it shows in the supermarket. thinking what to cook, i first come up with risotto (predictable, can’t help it…). it’s unlikely they have arborio rice, maggie says. unlikely, but this super market in a small Tennessee town tells another story, about its development and globalisation of food. there is arborio rice, and an entire mediterranean food section, and a large section of fresh vegetables of all kinds. (and potatoes individually wrapped in cellophane, which i need to get for the small america bookproject…)

a late night discussion after Pam and Amber have left us. maggie describes her observation of how a consciousness of privilege among white (middle-class) kids in this country keeps them caught in guilt, and also a kind of jealously, that life is really going on elsewhere. a discussion of white privilege, once more, and important to keep on having these, perhaps especially in this country. but i notice to what extent the guilt part really irritates me (ay, not a good attitude for organizing workshops… i must find another way to respond…) – it strikes me as yet another strategy of avoidence, of self-indulgence, of nestling in the comfort of the familiar, of simply not doing one’s work.

tijuana meeting

on the bus home i met with Lili, a young woman from the Brown Berets with whom i didn’t yet get a chance to talk to. she comes up to me, surprised that i’m also at UCSC, and insisting that i could join the small group that drives from UCSC every thursday to the meetings in Watsonville. you can’t imagine how much easier that will make it for me. i missed last two meetings because it was difficult to get everything organized. oh yes, she laughs, i don’t have a car nor a driver’s license, i hear you.

beautiful energy to be talking with Lili. she’s just back from Tijuana and overwhelmed by the experience. the meeting the Zapatistas had called for, with latino groups and leaders from the U.S. a destroyed cinema theatre with no roof. a first day with local mexican groups telling their stories and strategies. the second day with US latino groups telling their stuff. the Brown Berets talked about the raids on migrants, the migra watch. Sandino brought up the importance of free radio in the US. about 11 brown berets went together to Tijuana, and ended up doing quite a bit of security work, around el subcomandante Marcos. Lili couldn’t believe that she found herself a body guard of el subcomandente, and was impressed by the way men and women were treated equally. if didn’t matter if you were a small woman, she said, if you were the bodyguard, you were considered as such and treated with equal respect. i could envision her well in the brown uniform and beret, taking her task very seriously. when i read some of the reports of the meeting, i saw that women raised the issue of sexism and machoism in their communities. but in “full armor” and in charge of security, the power dynamic looks different…

on thursday evening Lili had an idea… if el subcomandante would phone to the Brown Berets meeting in Watsonville, to greet the companer@s. got everybody in Watsonville very excited. and just this busride with her got me very excited as well… won’t be long till i go to the next Brown Berets meeting.

read more:
on the Otra Campana website: 18 october | 19 october
on narconews.com: The Other Campaign Hits the US-Mexico Border, Where the Indigenous Are Called â€œMigrantsâ€ and Roots Run Deep

and below is a translation of piece on the Brown Berets in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

——————————————————

The Brown Berets of Watsonville, California

In a City of Immigrant Farmworkers, a New Youth Movement Draws
Inspiration from the Zapatistas and the Radical Organizing of the 60s

By Gloria MuÃ±oz RamÃrez
La Jornada
October 24, 2006

They take up the legacy of Chicano agrarian leader CÃ©sar ChÃ¡vez, of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King, of the Zapatistas and, of course, of sixties movements like the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets. From this last group they retake its name, its berets and its fighting spirit.

The new Brown Berets are a group of autonomous youths, most of them students, dressed head to toe â€œin the color of the earth.â€ They are based in Watsonville, California, an agricultural region inhabited and, above all, worked by tens of thousands of people of Mexican, African American and Filipino origin.

Ramiro Medrano relates: â€œWe began to organize in 1994. There was a lot of social mobilization in the United States in that year, because social assistance was being taken away from undocumented people with Proposition 187. That was also the year of the Zapatista uprising and we as Mexicans in the United States, as Chicanos, well, it made a big impact on us. The Chicano has an identity problem. We feel Mexican, but we are not recognized as such in Mexico, and neither are we gringos. After 1994, we were proud to say, together with the Zapatistas, we are Mexicans, indigenous people, and we are proud of it.â€

In Watsonville, 80 percent of the population is Mexican or of Mexican origin. The majority are field workers, indigenous people who confront racism daily through organization and strength of character. They are the workforce of the U.S. city that has the greatest exports of strawberries, lettuce, broccoli and raspberries, as well as other products harvested by the exodus on this side of the Rio Grande.

â€œIn 1994, the gang violence here left a young girl and her brother dead of gunshot wounds. This caused us to say ya basta â€“ enough already! â€“ to the violence generated by racism in the schools and in the fields. Young people with no options search for an identity, a sense of belonging, and that is how the gangs are formed. We didnâ€™t want that in our neighborhoods anymore,â€ Ramiro continues. And that is how the Brown Berets began. First with a great march for peace and unity that went through all the battle-torn neighborhoods. Later, once organized as a group, they had more long-term goals: get the youths out of the gangs; have representation in the schools and on their administration to avoid racism in the selection of students; organize against immigration raids and their agentsâ€™ actions in the barrio; hold workshops and events to strengthen identity through education, and many more, including the organization of a â€œJustice Networkâ€ in order to communicate by telephone the actions of la migra. Through this network they organize rapid concentrations of people to stop attacks by immigration agents, which they record and distribute. â€œItâ€™s about not just standing by.â€

Published in Spanish in Gloria MuÃ±os RÃosâ€™ column â€œLos de abajoâ€ (â€œThe Underdogsâ€) of October 21.

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.

brown berets

before the meeting sandino wants to flyer for the march on sunday, protesting the migra raids, and october 7 event, the 13th annual peace and unity march. we enter some taquerÃas on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza.

the room is filled with objects, posters and symbols of chicano power, black power and revolutionary movements in Latin America. once more the Che poster, familiar from sharon’s place in san francisco, which i’ve come to appreciate so much: At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love. the meeting is well structured, but full of humour and animo, in a combination that is starting to feel distinct (particular to a certain kind of US style leftwing groups) and familiar (the Chavez student coop, the Student Worker Coalition for Justice). although i must say i was happy that the meeting wasn’t as structured as in the other groups. it was a bit more fluid and warm.

many young people, i was reminded that the Brown Berets indeed remains, among many other things, a youth movement. (giulia, un mouvement de jeunesse! je retourne aux sources, pour apprendre comment les renouveller, pour quand on commence notre mouvement de jeunesse…). a meeting ground of students (high school and college) and youngsters with a past in the gangs, and these are overlapping categories. which do, on first sight, seem to be gendered: many of the students are (beautiful and intelligent) women, many of those with a gang past (and i have a vague, no doubt possibly mistaken, sense that i can distinguish, not so much on the basis of postures and looks, but in the way they are addressed by others) are young men. a third constituency: farmers and agricultural laborers. they are not there in actual presence, but by proxy, through some of the students and organizations working on issues of local agriculture, the Farmers Market…

coming out of violence, dealing with violence all the time. the woman who is keeping track of the killings announces that since last week, when they made the poster for the 13th annual peace and unity march – a poster on which they put all the names of people who died – she counted four more deaths. all homeless kids and people this time, one of them killed by other homeless people. she also tells the group that the stories of those killed are running through her head at night and preventing her from sleeping.

education to overcome violence. learning about history and legacies of resistance as a way to liberation. the room where the meeting takes place is called “the classroom”. apart from a sense of on-going education throughout all activities, it’s a separate point on the agenda. every week somebody prepares a talk. this week mario speaks about what he learned from living in El Salvador this summer.

these kids are from the states, from california, as i am reminded on several occassions. my surprise reflects problematic presumptions about connections with countries one’s family (used to) come(s) from. like i had expected the meeting to be at least partly in spanish, but english, infused with spanish words and expressions (Â¡sÃ, se puede!), was clearly the language of communication. it seems, i find out, that some of them don’t know spanish very well. or like mario’s story of going to El Salvador. his father lives there, was part of the resistance. yet mario organized his stay through a US organization. at some point it started to feel strange, he comments, to be working with white north americans in the country of his father. but before leaving this had seemed an obvious way to go there.
and more: throughout his presentation he insisted very much on the need for north americans to learn from a widely politicised culture such as the El Salvadorian one, a bit in the line of the conversation i had earlier with sandino. but then mario pointed to a terrain where he felt that “they” could learn from “us”: through all the violence in that society, starting in the times of Christopher “fucking” Columbus, as the guy is called in this classroom, their souls and spirituality were broken, and maybe some of the people from here could go back there and share spirituality. ay, i couldn’t help thinking, more californian nerve-wrecking spirituality, as an export product this time… but i shouldn’t let traumatic encounters with cali spirituality ruin this, it still remains to be discovered what kind of spirituality the Brown Berets seek to embody.

and of course these young people are californian, it’s my problematic surprise which should be questioned. complex and fractured threads of belonging in which the power of your actual physical location cannot be minimalized, even (or especially?…) if you’re invested in other belongings and build up a worldview to which other locations are central. [it reminds me of the story one of the students at the women’s studies summer school in madrid, when the planes crashed in the towers. she was mexican and had been brought up with a very critical anti-imperialist stance towards the US. then she got an opportunity to do a masters degree in NYC, a chance of a million which she didn’t want to waste. in 2001 she must have been based in NYC for about two years. the contrast between her own emotional reaction to 9/11 and the politicized reactions (“this is a respons to US hegemony”) of her family and friends back home, and how upsetting that difference was to her. after two years, which is nothing…]

and how different complex and fractured threads of belonging sometimes translate in harsh political realities. in the car sandino was shaking his head in disappointment while saying that, stupidly enough, there is quite some antagonism between the established latino communities and the newer immigrants from Latin America. as much as the Brown Berets talk about “our communities”, they are working with the knowledge that community is a political project in construction, that it’s about bonds and culture in the making.

political culture

it’s after closing time at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, the Victorian house with a peace sign on Broadway. sandino lets me in. sandino – si, it comes from augusto sandino (who headed the sandinistas). sandino’s father was all into the sandinistas, made a documentary video about them. we go to his place: he just started renting the apartment attached to the center. convenient and scary to have work and home so close. i plan to come back during office hours some other day, to learn more about the center itself.

during our quick dinner, we talk about political consciousness and organizing in the US. it started as i brought up international peace day, asking if the Resource Center had organized something, and carefully checking out what sandino thought of the big santa cruz light show for peace. he grimaces. he gets up and gets me an interview in the Good Times with the artist behind the project. read this, he insists. and i would suggest you’d read some fragments as well:

“Kirby Scudder has seen the light. Actually give him a week and we’ll all be seeing it, too. Five hundred of them to be exact, aligned along a three-mile stretch of West Clif Drive. The project is dubbed “Night-Light,” in which hundreds of battery-operated mega lights will suddenly brighten the coastline, their beams rocketing up to the heavens. It unfolds on Sept. 21 and it is, perhaps, one of the boldest, technically obtuse ventures a local has ever undertaken – all for the love of peace. And, in a day and age when American attitudes are heading south – the post 9/11 aftermcht and that thing called a war in Iraq – a local vigil for peace couldn’t come at a better time.”

“It actually has a lot to do with my upbringing as a Quaker in New York and being accountable for world events. We as citizens are accountable for who we are around the world. […] because I actually believe, whatever side of the war you are on, no matter who you vote for, were you are in the world, we are all Americans and all accountable. And I believe in accountability and that sort of spurred me to bring all these pieces together. And I thought, what can I do as an artist in this community about peace? And this is what I thought of.”

our responses to the big santa cruz international peace day event pass through grimaces and complicit glances. when sandino comments, he speaks of the need to work with what is there. given that political consciousness is so low in the U.S. every person getting out and contributing to a political cause in some kind of way, deserves support. at some point i sense his professional posture coming through: whether that means holding a silent vigil (grimace) or dressing up in black and covering your face (a supposedly neutral look, but the picture of el subcomandante on the fridge gives him away…), we need to respect these different forms. and work together. cause we already have so little political culture in the U.S., compared to other countries in the world (and i find out he lived a while in Nicaragua, and visited a number of other Latin American countries, including El Salvador). and sandino goes on with sketching the bleak picture till the point, imagine this dear friends, that i feel the need to bring up the sparks of hope in this country…
– “No wait, what about the immigrant marches. The sheer masses that got out on the streets, and at least they made the men and women in Washington DC a bit uncomfortable…”
– “Well funny that you should say that,” he responds, and bangs the flyer of the march on sunday, against the raids on undocumented people, on the table.

true. the timing is not a funny coincidence. and i learn that this was the first raid of this scale on migrants in the area. and la migra (all entities that enforce US immigration law) will be back, apparently they made that clear. repression after powerful mobilization. and it’s true that the mobilizations would need to be sustained to remain their power – something which doesn’t seem to be happening. and while where at it, it is true that it feels so very unlikely in this time and place, the idea of masses in the streets bringing a government to fall (and then i spare you sandino’s litany on the political system of the country…). but as we were on our way to a political meeting, we didn’t actually feel that disempowered at all.

feels good to get to know sandino a bit. he graduated from Community Studies, which seems to be a cool place (and where i’m trying to get in the social documentary course next quarter). he worked on alterglobalisation and his favorite medium is radio, you might try to check him out at Free Radio Santa Cruz, on Mondays from 7pm till 9pm, when he does a program called The Global Local.

hands

alone in the house tonight, wrap the space in some of the beautiful new music i got in brussels (sounds better than saying that i put the music really loud, doesn’t it…) and as i take all the time in the world to cook for myself i kind of enjoy the tiredness of a long day of work.

i sit down to phone sandino. he’s the guy from the Brown Berets that i met at the march and rally against violence in july. he’s very sweet. i find out that he works at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. i already came across people from the center both at the talk of Rabbi Lerner here in SC and at the Spiritual Activism conference in Washington DC. we decide to meet up at the center tomorrow, so i’ll get to see more of them.

sandino tells me more about the recent raids on migrants that took place in Watsonwille, SC and Hollister, on september 7th and 8th. basically the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency kidnapped people from there homes; more than 100 were arrested, and almost hundred were immediately deported. many of them were comrades, sandino says. there will be a march in Watsonville this sunday, and more activities planned in the next weeks. tomorrow the Brown Berets have there weekly meeting. sandino drives down to Watsonville every thursday for the meeting, and offers me the possibility to join him whenever i want. i’m curious and excited. a good time to joins us, he adds, we’ll need all the hands we can get.

cws 3

a particularly intimate session of our challenging white supremacy meetings with Sharon. just marÃa and me. we end up not talking about the texts but about difficult discussions with our political sisters and friends about the war, israel/palestine, israeli apartheid & the misuses of anti-semitism, how jews became “white” in the U.S. (with comparisons of how irish and italians became white), about the global action day against death penalty for homosexuality in iran, about tendencies within our feminist and lgbt movements not to address white privilege that end up making us complicit with white supremacist and imperialist geopolitics.

and how to do daily life in santa cruz with its sharp division between is very white character and the invisible latino labour of cleaning, care, manual labour… which is the back-bone of this town, and how to use “gate-keeping” positions – when you’re part of white privilege but for some reason have a position or connection or skill that you can use for the benefit of empowering those who don’t have white privilege, and in general how to become an ally.

and then there was New Orleans. i had spoken to Sharon on the phone just when she got back from New Orleans, and this beautiful and both fragile & powerful woman who will turn 70 later this year, said that she had only one word to capture the experience: life transforming. that her life and her way of political organizing would never be the same. this evening she shared many stories and analyses. things we had already learned about through the Reflections on Katrina conference and the events organized by the Student Workers Coalition for Justice earlier this year. but Sharon’s stories, characterized by great analytical and political sharpness and generosity, made it so much more tangible. the systematic ethnic cleansing, the amazing grassroots organizing, the complexities of the terrain in which to organize.

imagining her. she had been yearning to go back to New Orleans ever since the hurricane and the political respons hit the city, but she couldn’t because she lives with pain and needs to swim twice a day to manage the pain. she would need a swimming pool in the city to open. and the white privilege workshops she helped to organize for people from the Bay area going to reconstruct the most destoyed neighborhoods in New Orleans had added to an awareness of how to go and enter such a vexed place. then came, in the same week, an invitation from a community and organization leaders in New Orleans for a weekend of reflection on the solidarity work thusfar, and the news that a swimming pool had re-opened. a week later she left to New Orleans.

she arrived to the hotel where she had been a guest for many years, which was one of the few hotels in the french quarter of town that was up and running, and still had most of its same staff, mostly black people. happy to be supporting local business, and not to stay in the church where the Common Ground Collective volunteers were housed. the contradiction: the keys of the church were given only on the condition that only volunteers could stay there, no residents. (Sharon called this space “the colony”) but of course the contradictions don’t stop. after seeing familiar faces and hugging familiar bodies, her attention got caught by all the hugh tall men with very short hair in the hotel. then she starts seeing the uniforms. Blackwater, the private security firm, infamous for its actions in Iraq. from the one war zone to the other, operating in New Orleans under the Department of Homeland security. the hotel was one of it’s headquarters, one of the reasons it managed to stay in business. the image of the breakfast room with petite Sharon in her Free Palestine Tshirt (“i have no plain Tshirt…”) among all those bulldozers in uniform…

it had been lingering on mind and on our way back to Santa Cruz i take a decision: i want to go and do solidarity work in New Orleans.

sin fronteras

I read this article in the local Good Times newspaper on “A Day without an Immigrant” action on May Day during my dinner (what else is one to do when these house-mates of mine are already asleep at 10 pm, i don’t really understand that rhythm…), some interesting background information on immigration to California. Click here if you want to check it out.

spiritual activism (day one)

A pleasant early morning walk from Jayne’s house to the All Souls Church (a Unitarian Church), which hosts the conference. More than 1000 people are gathered in the building, it’s an impressive thing to bring so much people together for four intensive days of seeking to elaborate a new and different agenda. I’m eager to understand the stakes of this project, and determined to find out how and where it might or might not work, and what is to be learned from it, either way. In this vein, and since this move is about articulating progressive politics and religion/spirituality, i want to take the spiritual side very seriously, and not merely assess it in terms of how it enables or hinders progressive politics, which would take an existing notion of progressive politics as the standard. But how to “assess” the spiritual dimension of the projects, what are the points of reference in this respect? i’m not sure, i’ll have to figure that out as i go along. But the obvious place to start is myself, and allow to feel and articulate what the spirituality that is invoked and practised here does to me.

A folder with the program and various kinds of background information – as it already was clear before coming, this conference is packed. Packed with speakers, activities, moments of prayer and meditation… We’ll be sitting in this church a lot, as we start at 9 am and go on till 11.00 pm. Tough on the body, and yet the set-up differs from an academic conference with a similar crazy schedule. Collective moments of singing, dancing, turning to your neighbor to have a conversation about what one just heard from the pulpit (of course, after all, we’re in a church). Hm, some of this is hard on the soul for me… i love singing. But the conversations with the neighbor are too soon, too forced for me. The sociability of such a large gathering is already demanding enough, i don’t feel i can do the “now take 10 minutes to discuss this with your neighbor” pedagogy from day one… The first people i feel obliged to talk to share the mixed feelings, as a couple. He is very enthousiastic to engage, while she makes it clear that she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Yet she’s following the conversation i have with her man, and gets really interested in what i do, and clearly wants to know more (she does radio, her man tells me, and these are the kinds of subjects she likes to make radio shows about), and finds herself oscilliating between an engaged conversation or total withdrawal from the whole scene all together. A plenary session later, she has left the place. We should have met somewhere outside all of this. A reoccuring feeling throughout the day – somehow the social set-up it too much for me.

The opening talk by Sister Joan Chittister impresses, Peter Gabel’s talk doesn’t. Rabbi Michael Lerner talks about the inspiration for The Left Hand of God, elaborating on his talk in Santa Cruz. See, this is the part i appreciate a lot: re-thinking the world from the values of love, care, awe, radical amazement, generosity, gratitude and ecological responsibility (which, for people who have gathered here, are religious and/or spiritual values). A new bottom-line, as this is called here. Then comes the slippery, risky, but also exciting, part that is affirmed throughout the three talks: the need to redo the public-private distinction. How do public-private relate in a world that is fiercely private (rampant individualism) and dangerously public at the same time? (Sister Joan Chittister) We need to learn how to speak for an agenda not in the bureaucratic language of “single payer health care” but in terms of values, of why social security matters for us (Peter Gabel). By the way: i won’t be writing up my notes of all the talks on this blog, i’ll do that in a kind of more comprehensive report – get in touch if you want to have a look at that.

This desire to transform existing political culture is accompanied by two tactical moves. Splitting up in small groups of about 10 to 15 people, which are organized according to where one lives. The idea is to strenghten local networks and initiatives, maybe even local chapters- in other words, movement building. There are a couple of Bay Area groups, mine is faciliated by Irene from Beyt Tikkun. Together with her, i’m about the youngest in our group, which confirms an impression i had about age when entering the church this morning (Serious Problem #1). There’s one black woman in our group, which confirms an impression about ethnicity (Serious Problem #2). Hm, this doesn’t look good for a new movement…

The second tactic is that of influencing or impacting political bodies here in Washington DC, where the conference intentionally takes place. The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a quaker lobby for peace, holds an informative session and hands out guidelines on the process of contacting and talking to one’s political representatives. Hm, i’ll have to get my head around these particular kind of “civic lobby politics”.

The afternoon is all about preparation for meetings with senators and congressmen and -women tomorrow. Hundreds of appointments have been made beforehand, with the idea that individuals or small groups of people go and see their representatives and speak about either one or more issues that are elaborated in what this Network for Spiritual Progressives calls a new Spiritual Convenant with America (in which a new bottom-line is articulated for a number of important axes of public policy). I go to the International Relations workshop, facilitated by Rabbi Lerner. What would a new bottom-line in the field of international relations imply? Lerner proposes to start with a commitment of spending 5% of the GDP to development aid – a global Marshall plan to eliminate global poverty. The rationale: a redistribution point of departure will foster better international relations and security (“this would do far more for “homeland security” than anything else”.) Something dodgy about how that rationale posits the relationship between the economic and the political, but of course economic redistribution on a global scale is a good thing. The critical questions follow soon: what about problematic regimes? We wouldn’t want to be giving those amounts of money to regimes that support terrorism… A solution in by-passing such regimes and giving the money to NGOs (oh, more dodginess, the question of public accountability of NGOs…) and a strong affirmation that measures like these will precisely take the grounds for terrorism away. We need to make the political representatives understand that the well-being of America depends on the well-being of everybody on the planet.

Then i participate in a workshop about the new immigrant struggles, by Norma Chavez who works for JOB (Justice Overcoming Boundaries) in San Diego. The emphasis is on the Christian dimension of the recent mobilisations. Norma wants us to understand how in many places the organization of the marches was led by Catholic organisations, and think more about how these kinds of politics and spirituality could enforce each other. In fact, some participants to the workshop literally have a Bible in their hand to argue for open borders and against the illegalisation of people (Exodus and Leviticus are helpful here). She offers an overview of different laws and law proposals in the process of making people illegal, with HR 4437 as a landmark. She also vents some criticism against Rabbi Lerner, who consistently emphasizes the need for an integrated vision and warns against the trading in and negotiating over agenda points here and there, which culminated in “Screw realism!” at the end of his morning talk. Norma wanted to make it very clear that the different law proposals currently discussed would each have different material impacts on people’s lives, and that this is reason enough to advocate for the least bad proposal, even if it clearly does not express our ideal vision…

We are encouraged not to eat alone in the evening. Oh god, i was so ready to go and eat alone. But then i see the guy whom i bumped into when he was looking for the workshop on the clash of civilisations. I was curious to know how it went, and he wanted to know about the immigration one, so we decide to eat together. Before we know it some other people stick to us. Did i already mention that the kind of sociability the conference sought to foster was affecting my ability to be social in a nasty way? Moreover, some of the “feel good” spirituality had exactely the opposite effect on me.

My main dinner partner, i’ll call him S., is really interesting. He calls himself a spiritual anarchist. He came to the UK as a political refugee from South-Africa during the 1980s, and pursued his studies in Oxford, where he developed a brilliantly sharp insight in the old boys network and the workings of power especially in relation to racism. He’s a professor in sociology now, still in the UK. I fall for his language and accent, British with a postcolonial touch and a very fine sense of irony. His account of the clash of civilisations workshop is most entertaining. “Now Sarah (hm, the first one at the conference who doesn’t americanise my name…), do you know what i mean when i say that the session boiled down to a white liberal chap instructing his eager audience that islam is all about love and peace?” Oh yes. “So tell me, how useful would you say that it?” We could have talked for hours, not only about luke-warm and lousy responses to the clash of civilisations discourse, but very soon we talk about the ANC and the anti-apartheid struggle, how power and spirituality worked there, about anarchism, etc.

But that was without taking our other dinner guests into account. The Presbyterian minister, a rather young guy. On the right end of the religious spectre at a gathering of spiritual progressives – part of the people who, once they had identified to which religious tendency they belonged to, are met with surprise and gratitude, “Thank you for your presence here.” At some point the pastor asks me where i live. His eyes start to shine when i say Santa Cruz, “What a great place, i’ve lived there for a while, you must love it.” Ay ay ay, wrong move. “No, i basically can’t stand it.” He’s taken aback, and wants me to explain. When i describe the sense of isolation (politically, culturally,…) he considers for a moment and kind of gives in. Yes, he could see that, indeed, “it’s a bit away from the world.” But that, he continues on a more theological note, has it’s value, “to be away from worldly things.” He nods complacently. “And surfing,” he adds, “there is something very spiritual about surfing”. Sure, i nod (my turn to make a complacent move), “but before you know it there’s more blood on your hands than you can stand or deal with. You see, that bloody war in Iraq is not going to stop by itself while one is surfing in Santa Cruz.” Oh friends, what can i say, a spiritual activism conference doesn’t really bring out my better self, does it… But i had to come up with something, no?, here’s a theologically conservative pastor (i’m sure if we’d started talking about sexuality or reproductive rights i would not have liked at all what he was saying) giving me a lesson of the value of staying away from wordly things which is subsequently connected with an imaginary of a wonderful life (and waves) in Santa Cruz. And of course i was surrounded by people very well-trained in being patient and practising forgiveness and love so i was safe. To push it a bit further, and so we end up digging a bit in this seperation between “wordly and spiritual realms”, as it is framed in theological debates. And i take the opportunity to check out some of the hypotheses of my intellectual work, in which i take fundamentalism to be a signal of trespassing the established and “proper” demarcations between religiosity/spirituality and politics with the Presbyterian surfing dude. He tells me his church has been concerned by such “fundamentalist” (but more accurately, Evangelical) tendencies that are formulating their politics on the basis of their faith, cause though his church might share very similar theological concerns, it doesn’t like the politics these new evangelicals come up with. This is why his church is, carefully, tentively, checking out the progressive religious lines – in first instance not for their beliefs, but for their politics.

Then there are two women doing and MA in women’s pastoral work. They want to know all about my doctoral research. So what do “they” want, they kept on asking, about Muslim women. Remember that these are believing Christian ladies – their point was not one about incomprehension of why women would be believing – and slowly it’s starting to get on my nerves. S. drops a point about western and eurocentric bias within feminism and i have first have to turn to him and make the point that it all depends on which feminism and which concrete groups you’re talking about (and before i can finish the examples he’s nodding and smiling and i catch the lights in his eyes – he just wanted me to say all this…). By then the words conflict and antagonism were flying in the air and the two women were shaking their heads and saying that it was such a pitty that there were so much conflicts within the women’s movement, that we should stand strong together. As i still wanted to make the point of the bias in the things they were saying, i couldn’t help saying: “No, there are not enough conflicts! We need more conflicts that acknowlegde and work through the antagonisms which are there, now that would make our movements stronger.” By then the ladies look slighty upset and S. is holding his belly which is shaking with laughter.

At some point during the evening session, which promises to go till 11pm, i leave. I want to walk home, but people around me say i really shouldn’t. Since i’ve just arrived in this city, i don’t feel i can assess the situation very well. My intuition says it’s okay, but then all these people say no. I keep on asking the next person, and everybody says no. Whatever, i accept the lift that i’m offered. When i get back home, Jayne says it is not supposed to be a very safe neighboorhood, but that she regularly walks home at night and that it’s fine. Oh all those god-trusting people getting worked out over security…

I notice that Jayne usually goes to sleep earlier, and i’m pretty tired as well (i forgot i’m supposed to have a jetlag while booking my ticket, and the program doesn’t really allow for one), but there are still many things we need to talk about. She lived three years in Kirgistan, which i want to hear all about, like she wants to know about Tatarstan. She tells me sweet stories about being at home and happy there, feelings which got interrupted by a need to return to the USA as she realized more and more that this is the place where she can make more of a difference. And we talk about lobby politics. At first she wants me to explain my preocupations and even why i use the term “lobbying” for the civic thing of concerned citizens meeting with their political representatives. While i’m just trying to figure out whether these are dots that can be connected through a continuum. She kind of insists on a difference between citizens (civic activism) and NGOs (advocacy) lobbying on the one hand, and corporate and industrial lobby politics on the other. But our conversation leads us to into one grey zone after the other.

Jayne works in a NGO focused on small farmers in the US. Among their activities: to strengthen support networks among small farmers, and to create conditions for transnational solidarity. One of the things they do, in search of countering global neo-liberal ideologies and tactics, is to invite famer activists from Africa to tour among small farmer communities in the US and start conversations about common grounds and strategies. This is the part of the work she likes. But at the moment their energies are consumed by the new Farm Bill, which is supposed to be renewed and voted next year. Trying to raise awareness among political representatives, advocacy and the spiral of lobby politics. You know that the big agro-business are doing it, Jayne says, so you can’t afford not to try to get your vision and points on the agenda “in Washington”. A widely spread rationale, hence the crazy amount of jobs opportunities in Washington, that are, in some way or another, about influencing political agendas. Sounds a tiny bit like Brussels. But you see, i tell her, in Brussels among certain political networks and circles, there’s a strong idea that politics shouldn’t be like this, shaped on the “lobbying” model… Well, here it’s an established and widely accepted way of how the political terrain operates (Jayne studied government studies and international relations, in some Boston school focused on political science and goverment), she tells me, and putting yourself outside of it means cutting yourself off from some of the available power and resources to change things. Mind you, meanwhile she’s looking for a new job and would so much rather be working on the farm…

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.”