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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> with the artist behind the project. read this, he insists. and i would suggest you’d read some fragments as well:<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, that i feel the need to bring up the sparks of hope in this country… 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, on Mondays from 7pm till 9pm, when he does a program called The Global Local.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading “political culture”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n– “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…”
\n– “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.<\/p>\n