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 taquer\u00c3\u00adas on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza.<\/p>\n
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.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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…<\/em>). 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…<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 (\u00c2\u00a1s\u00c3\u00ad, 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 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…]<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 taquer\u00c3\u00adas on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza. the room is filled with … Continue reading “brown berets”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31,17,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230"}],"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=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nand 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<\/a> 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<\/a> ruin this, it still remains to be discovered what kind of spirituality the Brown Berets seek to embody.<\/p>\n