Category Archives: Social Justice

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

1 Reply

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by  government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes  yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

            You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

 

Separatismo in the Age of Global Coloniality

2 Replies

by Marie Cruz Soto

Last June 23rd, I participated for the first time in the U.N. Decolonization Hearings on Puerto Rico. My statement addressed the detrimental effects the U.S. Navy has had on Vieques and how these did not magically disappear with its official parting from the island eleven years ago. The horrors of the past cannot be done away with so easily, especially when the conditions that facilitate them persist. I thus emphasized how the colonial status of the Puerto Rican archipelago has facilitated the abuses committed in the island-municipality. Petitioner after petitioner, from their different perspectives, similarly stressed the detrimental effects of colonialism. And at the end of the day the Special Committee unanimously approved a call on the U.S. to, “allow the people of Puerto Rico to fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence, as well as take decisions, in a sovereign manner, to address their economic and social needs.”[1] The statement is in accord with the view shared by, arguably, the majority of Puerto Ricans who hold that the present relationship to the U.S. is unacceptable and that islanders have the right to self-determination.[2] Yet, self-determination is commonly understood as choosing between independence, statehood, and (an enhanced version of) commonwealth. Puerto Ricans are not dreaming of independence. Or at least not of the independence offered by traditional party politics. The option received 5% of the votes in the latest referendum, which coincides with the numbers of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño in general elections.[3] The question is: Why? With the centrality of nation-states to modern liberal democracies and global world order, why is the political imagination of islanders captive to a triad in which independence seems to fulfill the role of scaring people to vote for the other two options? A look at two recent initiatives may throw some light on the issue.

Anyone following the news these days will know that things in Puerto Rico are heated. And not just because of the summer temperatures. The Puerto Rican government is currently confronting a fiscal crisis, credit rating agencies, and unions. The talk about austerity measures and strikes may have opened up some space for stories to circulate about unorthodox political thinking. And, indeed, it may appear as counterintuitive for separatistas in a colonial setting to be against nation-state and for empire. But this is the case with two initiatives that have caught the attention of the media. On the one hand, a group called Movimiento de Reunificación con España (MRE) has declared null the 1898 Treaty of Paris and expressed desire to be annexed to Spain.[4] According to its founder José Nieves Seise, the Iberian metropole granted political autonomy to Puerto Ricans with the 1897 Carta Autonómica. Puerto Rico stopped then being a colony and thus could not be ceded to the U.S as booty of war the following year. Islanders had to be consulted for the Treaty of Paris to be valid. And since they were not, the transfer of sovereignty to the U.S. was illegitimate and so have been the last 116 years of U.S. rule. He further states that Puerto Ricans have supported options other than annexation “because in school we were taught a distorted version of history, one that demonized Spain and that hid the fact that we were Spanish citizens and that we are the descendants of the conquistadores.”[5] For him, Puerto Rico is (in a good and inalienable way) a product of Spanish colonialism, and annexation a matter of putting things right. Not only does annexation corrects a historical wrong, but it also opens up a brighter future with a more benevolent empire. Spain, for the MRE, stands in stark contrast to a U.S. Empire that has long neglected Puerto Ricans and denied them of political representation and economic opportunities. In this sense, U.S. rule is, more than illegitimate, highly undesirable. But so is a Puerto Rican nation-state.

On the other hand, there are the Viequense separatistas. These seek independence from Puerto Rico in order to establish a more direct relationship with the U.S. The initiative steers clear of identity politics and nostalgic looks at the long colonial past of the Puerto Rican archipelago. There is no counter-slogan to the MRE’s “Somos puertorriqueños Somos españoles No gringos.”[6] It assumes instead a rather pragmatic stance that has surprised, if not disturbed, many Puerto Rican main islanders. Indeed, the initiative cannot but make main islanders uncomfortable given that it is built on a searing critique of Puerto Rican politics. According to the spokespersons Yashei Rosario and Julián García, the Viequense island-community suffers from underdevelopment and from the neglect of San Juan-based politicians who take detrimental decisions from far away.[7] Not knowing or caring about the people on the other side of the Vieques Sound. Water is here a divide that separates Viequenses from constituents actually benefited by the actions of their elected officials. In this regard, Rosario further states that Vieques is doubly colonized: by Puerto Rico and by the U.S. The agenda of these separatistas is thus not built on a romanticized vision of the U.S. It is not even built on the typical colonial mentality of the incapacity of the colonized. Rosario, on the contrary, identifies the U.S. as an oppressive power and Viequenses as individuals who can develop themselves successfully. If only allowed to. The goal then is to sever ties to Puerto Rico and work with the remaining metropole in the securing of economic well-being.

The MRE and the Viequense separatistas while embracing different empires concur on their rejection of a Puerto Rican nation-state. In order to do so, the MRE opens up the past to the demands of the present. It depends on historical reinterpretations that elide the fact that the Carta Autonómica was only granted after four centuries of imperialism and anti-colonial resistance. Rather than a gift, the Charter was a modest opening that came late and at a high price. For it was not in the nature of the Spanish Empire to be any kinder than the U.S. Both endeavored to discipline the local population and ensure that independence was neither viable nor desired by islanders. Eradicating dissent, by any means necessary, has been fundamental to the fashioning of a profitable colony. And Puerto Rico has been a profitable colony. One historically dependent on the work of enslaved and immigrant peoples. Their central role in the making of modern day Puerto Ricans renders any unqualified claim to Spanish ancestry problematic. The Viequense separatistas accordingly overlook that, while the Puerto Rican government has many times enacted unfavorable policies for Vieques (and the rest of the archipelago), it has also with limited power of negotiation deterred the actions of the U.S. For if San Juan-based politicians backed the onset of the 1940s expropriations, they later avoided the complete takeover of the island by the U.S. Navy. Puerto Rican main islanders and the diaspora, in addition, were instrumental in driving out the Navy. Without their support, it is quite likely that Viequenses would still be living between an ammunition depot and a live fire target range. In these post-Navy days the U.S. federal government has repeatedly invoked sovereign immunity in order to evade responsibility over the welfare of Viequenses. It is thus unclear what sort of support the Viequense separatistas could expect. Yet, they wish to cast their lot with the U.S., and the MRE with Spain.

It would be easy to reduce the actions of these two groups to opportunism, to historical amnesia, or to the otherwise ills of a colonial mentality. It would be more productive, however, to contextualize their actions diachronically and synchronically. All Puerto Ricans are the product of a long colonial history throughout which dissent has been persecuted and the capacity of islanders has been questioned. Over the years the violence of colonialism has been normalized and made part of the invisible workings of the everyday. It is then not surprising that Puerto Ricans have trouble imagining a future without a metropole. And this daring feat only becomes more difficult when the metropole shuns the term empire and claims to be the defender of liberal principles, human rights, and economic development. Anti-imperial critiques are thus rendered nonsensical. Yet, Puerto Ricans are also of this world characterized by Arturo Escobar as ruled by imperial globality and global coloniality. The terms highlight the U.S.-led, “economic-military-ideological order that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world-wide.”[8] Nation-states, in this context, take back seat to global dynamics that “heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups.”[9] This is not to say that nation-states are irrelevant in the potential offsetting of such global dynamics, or that the search for independence is not a worthy endeavor, but rather that the optimism which once permeated mid-20th century decolonization movements is lost. Nation-states can no longer be considered the panacea to the problems faced by historically marginalized groups. Neither can nationalism be understood as inherently anti-colonial or empowering discourse. New political imaginings are needed to envision a more just world.

[1] http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2014/gacol3269.doc.htm

[2] http://ceepur.org/es-pr/Webmaster/Paginas/Eventos-Electorales.aspx

[3] http://ceepur.org/es-pr/Webmaster/Paginas/Eventos-Electorales.aspx

[4] http://reunificaciondepuertorico.blogspot.com/

[5] http://www.elnuevodia.com/boricuasbuscanlaanexionaespana-1791528.html

[6] http://reunificaciondepuertorico.blogspot.com/

[7] http://www.elnuevodia.com/viequensesbuscanindependizarsedepuertorico-1777687.html

[8] Escobar, Arturo.  “Beyond the Third World: Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality and Anti-globalisation Social Movements.” Third World Quarterly 25:1 (2004): 207.

[9] Escobar, “Beyond the Third World.”

Marie Cruz Soto teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. She has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests and publications focus on the island community of Vieques, militarized colonialism, reproductive rights, knowledge production, and coloniality. She is currently working on a book manuscript that delves into the five-century struggle of peoples to inhabit the island of Vieques and of empires to control it.

Violence Against Latina/o Migrants

4 Replies

by Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Driving down Main Street in Half Moon Bay several weeks ago, a short detour from the wealthy tourist zone into a residential apartment complex two blocks away brought me into the borderland between the middle to upper class white community and a mixed class of Latinos in this small Northern California town. We slowed the car to get a closer look at the hundreds of Latinos/as dressed in black outside a church. It was as if they were floating to the rhythmic flow of Aztec dancers, their bodies gracefully leaning back to release hundreds of white balloons into the sky, pleas for peace in a community united by rage over the recent death of an 18-year-old Latina by a white police officer. A Latino tasked with facilitating the flow of traffic walked up to us and I quickly rolled down the car window. He responded to my concerned look by explaining the events that led up to this funeral.

“The police are out of control in this country,” he said with anger rising in his voice. “They shot and killed a young Latina with mental health problems, shot her in her own home.” I found out later that the family called 911 when their daughter, Yanira Serano, would not take her medication, hoping the paramedics would arrive as they usually did. The police arrived instead. When faced with this woman running towards them with what her family say was a butter knife, a police officer shot her dead “in self defense.” The family and others wanted to know: Why didn’t the police use a Taser gun, or try to disarm this young woman? And I think to myself, this would not have happened in a white, middle class home. Is the racialized criminality of migrants so high that police are increasingly turning to guns to solve “problems” in Latino communities? The hostility of police toward migrants, like African-Americans, speaks to the disposability of certain lives, those who are criminalized, dehumanized, and stripped of the most basic protections and rights in U.S. society. At least these incidents are spawning widespread demands for rights and humanity by Latino communities. Young women and residents protested Yanira’s death, as they occupied the tourist zone where the sheriff’s office is located shouting for “Justicia!” through the bustling streets of the downtown area of Half Moon Bay.

This police shooting of a Latina is hardly an isolated event. The recent killing of a Latino migrant by police officers in Salinas and others in Anaheim similarly spawned protests, especially in cities in California where racialized tensions between Latinos and whites have a long history.[i] The Salinas murder, which happened only months before and was the third police homicide that year, ignited street protests where over a thousand people met in the streets of Salinas to demand justice, and an investigation of racially motivated police violence in the area. Unfortunately, media attention to this murder was drowned out by the shooting spree of a  Santa Barbara City college student, a wealthy young man, whose psychological profile captured attention after he tragically killed six innocent people, supposedly in response to a lack of attention from young women. It is the (racialized) innocence of the Santa Barbara victims that the media contrasts to the reporting of migrants deaths, who are criminalized as always potentially out to commit a crime. No one talks about the laws themselves that criminalize every aspect of migrant life.

Many of us are well aware of the rising deaths of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Not only are migrants dying as they cross the most militarized borders, as well as deathly desert zones in Arizona, Texas, and California, but the pumping of funds into border patrol personnel and surveillance technologies are spreading this terror to cities across the United States. Secure Communities, a government sponsored program to educate and empower local police to take on the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), stretches how we conceptualize borders, transferring border zones from the imagined space between nations to a much more deterritorialized terrain that stretches beyond the nation and into the most intimate sphere of immigrants’ everyday life. For example, the United States contributes funding, border control strategies, and technologies to Mexico and Central American countries to slow the numbers of migrant crossings into Mexico and ultimately the United States. In exchange for negotiating a better deal for its own migrants in the United States, Mexico detains and deports Central American and other migrants crossing its Southern Border, the majority from Ecuador.[ii] In addition, drones manufactured by U.S. and Israeli companies patrol both sides of the border in the name of narcoterrorism, shifting war technologies to the U.S.-Mexico border as well as other borders around the world.[iii] We might want to think of this as another stage of global imperialism where technologies spread the power of the United State’s control over land and bodies, a form of governance I call “techno-empire.” The United States can control countries like Mexico from afar without having to literally take over another country. For example, by launching drones over Mexican territory, or selling surveillance technologies whose optics can be viewed from any Internet location, the United States keeps watch of not only migrants and drug cargo, but also the police and border patrol on the other side of the border. Given the use of militarized technologies to fight the “war on terror,” U.S. technological dominance compromises Mexico’s sovereignty to determine it’s own border policies and practices.

This militarization of the border financially supports high-tech companies as well as the prison industrial complex (as detention centers continue to expand), leading to gross profits made on policing bodies whose value relies on their de-humanization. Migrant deaths and deportations are calculated as simply the collateral damage of the war at the border. Hundreds of migrants have been killed by heat exhaustion, drones, and helicopters (especially in Texas), while surveillance cameras positioned in border patrol cars, fences, and across the border region track people like hunted animals to be detained, imprisoned, or exported from the United States. It seems as though the power to identify and police each other has spread through a state of exception that normalizes war onto racialized bodies charged with the potential to threaten, rather than enhance, American life. All are empowered – the police, hospital personnel, schools, vigilantes or “citizen border patrols,”[iv] and everyday individuals (“If you see something, say something”) – to call in (and sometimes kill) potentially undocumented individuals. In fact, Texas border patrol can legally shoot moving vehicles suspected of carrying undocumented migrants. Officers and helicopters are indeed mobilizing this right, leading to a spate of deaths, including the killing of a migrant mother who was shot through her car windshield, leaving behind her crying 18 month-year old in the front seat.

Ironically, securing the border is often justified through the protection of innocent women and children trafficked across the border, even as migrant women are demonized as irresponsible mothers due to a lack of English language skills and for breaking the law by crossing the border, among other reasons. Further aggravating the situation is the conflation of migrants with gang members, smugglers, and terrorists in the media, which has police responding to a racialized rage (and fear) that results in the death of migrants. It’s not only rage that drives these deaths, but the widespread disrespect for the rights and humanity of migrants whose very bodies have recently been found dumped in mass graves in Texas. While the law stipulates that all dead bodies must be identified in Texas, as in most states, it appears as though migrant bodies found in the border regions of Texas and other states are being dumped into mass graves without identification.[v] Similar to the lack of justice for the disappeared women in Juarez, many in Mexico and Central America search for loved ones with few resources to pay the thousands of dollars required to exhume and identify bodies discarded most efficiently in a burial site in Texas. And the rapid rise in numbers of children migrating without an adult across multiple countries en route to the United States, or left behind by a parent in detention who has been deported back to Latin America, or killed, should be evidence enough that the “war at the border” is creating many more problems than it solves. The walls erected at the border mirror the halted flow of knowledge about how migrants are being brutally stripped of humanity in the media. I am hopeful that migrants from around the world will continue to see themselves in alliance against the techno-virtual imperial state, and its militarized apparatus. And continue to rise up in defiance.

Notes

[i] A video of the Salinas killing went viral when caught on someone’s cell phone. A Latino man had entered a woman’s house in what they think was an attempted theft and rape (although nothing was taken and no one was hurt) and was caught stumbling down the street of Salinas. After the police followed him for two blocks, they shot, and killed him on the corner of a busy street in the middle of the day.

[ii] Many of these migrants come from Ecuador. See David Kyle and Christina A. Siracusa, “Seeing the State Like a Migrant” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (eds., Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 153-176.

[iii] See Tom Barry, International Policy Report, “Drones Over the Homeland: How Politics, Money and Lack of Oversight have Sparked Drone Proliferation, and What we can do.” April 23, 2013. http://www.ciponline.org/research/html/drones-over-the-homeland.

[iv] These are citizens who take over the name Minutemen in order to patrol the border and prevent migrants from crossing, oftentimes by seriously injuring and killing those who cross their path. See the Southern Poverty Law Center article, “InvestigatingDeaths of Undocumented Immigrants on the Border,”Intelligence Report, Fall 2012, Issue Number:  147. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/fall/death-in-the-desert. Accessed June 21, 2014.

[v] FoxNews.com, “Mass graves with bodies of unidentified immigrants discovered in south Texas cemetery,” Perry Chiaramonte and The Associated Press, June 24, 2014. Accessed on June 24, 2014: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/06/24/mass-graves-with-bodies-unidentified-immigrants-discovered-in-south-texas/

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is an Associate Professor in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a Ph.D from the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona. Her book, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, was recently been published by New York University Press (2013). Her new research interests examine visual and surveillance technologies, and the sexual criminalizing of immigrant bodies across the U.S. – Mexico border.

In Honor of Earth Day: Composting at a Workplace

2 Replies

compost photoby Erika Gisela Abad

On one of those rare sunny mornings in Portland, my roommate and I take advantage of the sun, sitting out on the deck and talking about the food we can grow. Growing locally requires a lot of work, preparing the soil, finding the seeds, gauging what seeds and what resources to use because of what it means for our food and the insects that help produce it. The food she and I eat varies and as we replant vegetables and cuttings that can regrow we review where our scraps go and what we can do. At my local food pantry, we have a similar conversation, but we focus on the foods they, Latina immigrant women, bring from their homes, the ways they try to grow it and how to feed the poor. We’re all making ends meet, but making ends meet is also about eating and breathing better. Where we get our seeds and where we get the nutrients we need to grow them is critical in that conversation. At both the Hispanic community’s fundraisers and at home, we’ve established compost systems to improve how we feed our food and how we express gratitude for what the earth provides. It’s about reflecting on what we do with excess, whether that be the plant stuff that can be replanted to produce more food, or the food scraps that we allow to decompose in our yards to revive the soil. I learned about these issues in my grandmother’s kitchen, in the kitchen of many working class women and women of color who had to answer this question: how do we feed ourselves with minimal resources and who can/will share their abundance so that we could make our own?

Living and working in a city like Portland, that collects compost more frequently than trash, I thought composting would open up the conversation about how we each gardened or could begin to garden at home. I began composting at work, initially because I wanted a guaranteed source of used coffee grounds. Coffee grounds are useful for a number of reasons, but I wanted to see what it would take to compost in a work place not otherwise expected to compost. Below, I explain the steps I took and what I used to establish a relatively effective compost system at work.

Materials Needed

  • At least 2 Containers with lids (I started with old coffee canisters but growing practice required five-gallon buckets)
  • Grocery cart
  • List of compostable materials
  • Reminder signs

First, I started by asking the manager if I could set up a small compost station in our break room. On getting permission, I reviewed the places in the break room I could place the canister. While I place my compost bin in the garage which lies off the kitchen, there was minimal room under the sink in the office’s break room.  Given where the coffee was located and what minimal shelf space there was, I placed the canister in the corner behind the coffee pot as that corner was also next to the recycling area.  Putting the canister near the recycling kept all ‘green’ trash in the same place; placing it near the coffee pot would assure minimal mess in transferring used coffee grounds from the pot to the canister.

Once I had a system, I sent a mass email to coworkers. In the email, I explained that the office allowed me to start composting to minimize trash and I answered the following questions: what was the philosophy behind composting? why was it beneficial for our office community? The exercise, for me, was not just about getting free materials for my garden’s compost; it was also about learning how to talk about socially relevant issues in a way that was accessible. In the email, I also explained I would take full responsibility for it. I chose to take full responsibility because I was controlling where the compost was going and, in the first year, I privileged just being able to collect whatever food scraps, used coffee grounds and used napkins I could. Politically, I knew I was asking a lot from my coworkers given each individual’s personal boundaries with ‘dirt,’ mess, and the possibilities of a lingering smell. In asking them to consider adding another practice to their disposal of waste, I wanted to minimize their role in an effort to focus on beginning a cultural shift around what needed disposal and what could be recycled.

The shift required more than an email. A supervisor suggested I post a sign above the trash can as well as next to the compost container/recycling station so to encourage as well as remind other coworkers that we had a compost station. Within a few months, the old coffee canisters I used to collect materials were getting filled every other day. Signage and conversations with coworkers improved and increased participation. Even though we had multiple canisters filling up, it was difficult to navigate given the increased participation. With growing participation, there grew a need to invest in or find larger containers.

As composting was becoming commonplace at work, I had to ask myself what culture of composting I wanted to promote. I was reluctant to buy anything because, from what I had learned, central to the composting philosophy was making trash into treasure. In other words, redefining the possibilities of what could be re-used. While I was still perusing Craigslist and Freecycle for a container a coworker volunteered to buy me one. I appreciated the gesture, as it indirectly distributed the responsibility of composting but, funny enough, as I was walking to the bus the following day with the new one in my hand, I found a three-foot stack of empty five-gallon buckets down the street. I took three buckets and three lids. More buckets lent themselves to easier transport and transfer. Since then, I switch the buckets every few weeks. As we collected more compost, I made a point to integrate used paper towels and brown paper bags to absorb whatever smell would have been produced. The carbon contribution paper provided also contributed to balancing the carbon-nitrogen ratio. While the buckets secured shut, I was wary of what opening them would inspire in well-intended volunteer composters.

Respecting Your Office Mates

Remember, composting is a volunteer effort. We each have our learning curves as well as diverse understandings of what can decompose at the rate we want, based on how we intend to use the compost. If you notice more meat and cheese and oil than your home system can tolerate, send coworkers a reminder email of what the compost’s boundaries are. Be considerate of workplace boundaries and maintain a break room’s culture as a space of comfort/leisure. As can be expected, compost can be messy. We all expect clean break spaces in our office and it was important that I respect that considering I was asking a lot of people by introducing a new practice. The transition to greater support required I pay closer attention to the mess created. I wiped down the bin as well as the surrounding area whenever I saw it getting messy. I equally had to address the initial use of old coffee ground containers so as to minimize the clutter the collection was producing. In other words, as much as the environmental ethos that drove composting was about improving the quality of life, it was important that I equally support a clean and tidy break room. I did my best to keep the station clean, recognizing that the transition could be difficult to accept if the change did not accommodate the initial norm of a compost free workspace. The daily attention cleaning requires is well worth it not only because of what the scraps will contribute to a garden over time.

Gratitude and Sharing

Food scraps take months to a year to decompose; growing food with minimal additives in an environment full of birds, slugs and insects does not guarantee a strong yield. For that reason, as much as I would have liked to, I did not commit to bartering for coworkers’  contributions with food. In an effort to continue building community and finding ways to share what I was growing, I found other ways of saying thank you. I would set out extra greens like kale, mustard, arugula for others to take. I also shared tomato surpluses as they come into my possession. At other times, I would make salsa with the ingredients I grew, buy a bag of chips and leave it in the break room for others to enjoy. Coworker smoothies benefited from the additional greens.

The culture of sharing wasn’t new to the office. Given our economic position, we made the most of what we had and shared when we could. Being able to share good food that was good for us, complemented the community empowerment I had born witness to in the networks of urban gardening in which I had learned so much. In the three years I have been growing food with friends in their yards, with organizations converting lawns and unused lots into food gardens, I learned how accessible each step of the growing food process could be. I did read a little, but friends and co-volunteers were my best teachers, closely followed by what I learned by practice and imitation. As much as composting at work is about decreasing waste, contributing to food’s food, for me, it continues to be about finding a more intimate relationship with understanding what we eat and sharing the fruits of that close relationship with others. While expanding the possibilities of surplus food requires changing a lot of habits, the community built and sustained through the process has been well worth it.

Works Cited

“Portland Composts!” Planning and Sustainability. The City of Portland, Oregon. n.d. Web. 4 April 2014.

“Coffee Grounds Perk up Compost Pile with Nitrogen.” Oregon State University Extension Service. 9 July 2008. Web. 4 April 2014

“Compost Needs.” Compost Fundamentals. Whatcomm County Extension. Washington State University. n.d Web. 4 April 2014

The Freecycle Network. https://www.freecycle.org

“Materials for Composting: What to Compost.” Composting for the Home Owner. University of Illinois Extension. n.d. Web. 4 April 2014

“What to Compost.”  Composting in the Home Garden. University of Illinois Extension. n.d. Web. 4 April  2014

Urban Farm Collective. http://urbanfarmcollective.com/

Erika Gisela Abad, PhD, is grateful for the coworkers who compost at work with her and who helped her review this essay. Her essays and poetry have been published in Diálogo, Mujeres de Maiz, and The Feminist Wire. She learned to garden with the Urban Farm Collective as well as with friends she made while living in North Portland. Since finishing graduate school, she has been supporting the Latino community of her North Portland open and affirming Catholic parish, running between the kitchen and the food pantry, going to where she is needed. She can be found on twitter @lionwanderer531. 

Enriching our Educational Advocacy for Latino Students and the Community

5 Replies
Public Meeting in Texas on HB5.

Public Meeting in Texas on HB5.

by Maricela Oliva

Those of us involved in education have for years focused on school achievement or college success, foci that are conceptualized in terms of lower (K-12) or higher (post-secondary) education. I propose that we need to evolve and enrich our educational advocacy from a school or college issue to one that re-imagines educational success as a P-16 endeavor. This seems easy enough to do, but I argue that it is actually more difficult because it requires our involvement in efforts to impact educational achievement with cross-level and systemic rather than level-focused interventions. These broader interventions require collaboration and interdisciplinary boundary-spanning work. Furthermore, necessary and cross-level systemic change is best achieved with the participation not only of individuals and groups working on issues from the inside of key educational organizations but also of allies working from outside them, in the broader community.

An illustrative example for those of us in Texas is the HB 5 statute that passed the Texas Legislature in Spring 2013. This bill packaged two large objectives in one instrument: a reduction of testing at the school level (as advocated by school level educators and scholars) and a change in the high school preparation curriculum. Changes to the curriculum eliminated the common high school preparation curriculum while putting in place a foundational curriculum for all with additional voluntary endorsements that schools could also offer their students (multidisciplinary, arts, STEM, other). The statute had multiple stakeholders of support: teachers, school-level scholars, technical-vocational educators, corporations, employers, and a Republican governor. Higher education was not among those supporting changes in the curriculum. Focusing on college readiness, the Commissioner of Higher Education actually argued against changes in the high school preparation curriculum because of the negative impact on the college readiness of all, especially Latino students.

Paradoxically, educators at both lower and higher education argued that their opposite views reflected concern for the well-being of students. How can this be so? Advocates and detractors of the bill were looking at it from their unique perspective and often failed to see the issue or concern from the level different from their own. In other words, school advocates did not understand or think the higher education critiques important enough to hold back their support of the bill. From the higher education side, Higher Education Commissioner Paredes was not able to convince supporters that they might be helping themselves in terms of testing reduction but hurting themselves by eroding college readiness and access for students.

Bill sponsors were smart, in my view, to package the two issues (testing reduction and curricular change) in the same bill. They anticipated that supporters of the testing issue would overwhelm critics of the curricular change issue; indeed, this is what happened. School-level educators were so keen on getting the school testing reduced that they did not listen to or hear concerns from higher education about the new high school graduation requirements. For example, they did not hear that 8th graders from low-income and first generation families might not select the high school curriculum that would be in their long-term best interest and that would promote their readiness for college. They did not pay attention to concerns that high achieving graduates in the foundational curriculum would no longer be eligible for Texas’s automatic college admissions program for students in the top ten percent of their graduating class, undermining a program that has enabled access to elite state universities for new students, including Latina/o students. They did not pay attention to the fact that colleges and universities would still look most favorably on students who demonstrate traditional college-readiness, nor to others’ equity concerns given that not all schools would be able to offer all of the voluntary endorsements. In the end, bill sponsors with sleight of hand, managed to create a scenario that almost guarantees that in the future, fewer Latino students will be college ready and college admitted to an institution of choice when they graduate high school. If young people and their families are allowed to pick their high school curriculum in 8th grade, quite a few may not understand the consequence of choosing a curriculum that makes room for employment in high school rather than college ready courses, one that allows them to avoid Algebra II rather than challenge themselves with rigorous coursework to make themselves an attractive applicant when they apply to college, etc. Since the various curricula are often incommensurate, young people will find it difficult to recover from the wrong choice once they later better understand its impact on their college access and readiness.

I recently sat in on a conference session in which school counselors and other school level educational personnel learned about and asked how to implement HB 5. School curriculum directors and higher education admissions officers made up a panel that presented their view of how HB 5 would impact their work. My understanding of what I saw and heard in that session is that implementation will be very complicated at the school level. Furthermore, those districts and schools in which personnel already have a handle on facilitating college readiness (i.e., those with a college-going culture) will do their best to implement the unfunded mandate in ways that anticipate students’ mistakes and that leave their college readiness options open until students fully understand the impact of their decisions. They plan to do this with face to face meetings with each individual child and their parents to explain the curricula and what they mean. However, at schools with overwhelming counselor-to-student ratios, such as at schools that are majority minority or that do not have a college-going culture, it was not clear that they could be so effective. Students there, the ones that we already have the biggest challenge getting to college, probably will not get this high level interaction as they choose their high school curriculum. For us in Texas, the largest and fastest-growing group in the school pipeline is Latino students, who are now the most at risk from these curricular changes.

How could this happen in Texas, a relatively policy savvy environment in which we already recognize the importance of promoting college-going among Latinos and where we have long acknowledged the importance of Latino youth to the future well-being of the state (see Closing the Gaps). This happened because first, analysts focused on issues at K-12 or post-secondary levels of education and did not have a sufficiently developed P-16 view of the issues that impact our community. Second, conservative policy-makers packaged the two issues in the same bill so that concerns about proposed changes to the high school preparation curriculum would be overwhelmed by support for testing reduction. And it worked.  So now, is it possible to “make a silk purse out of [the] pig’s ear” that is, potentially, the curricular part of HB 5?

Those of us in education and community advocacy have learned to be vigilant about what happens with schools and to better understand the need to talk to young people in concrete ways about the school to college pathway. In San Antonio, the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) had already created OurSchool Portal (http://www.idra.org/ourschool/) as a program that allows parents and families to understand educational impacts and outcomes at area high schools. The intent was to help parents and families advocate for changes that would improve children’s educational success and college readiness. At the state level, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board created Compare College Texas (http://comparecollegetx.com/) so that families and prospective college students can look for institutions that are a good fit for their needs and interests. Nationally, The College Board has created a comprehensive online program for exploring colleges and college choice throughout the US. BigFuture (https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/) encourages children and parents to explore their options early and together. In this way, parents can be part of the college readiness and choice process, even if they did not themselves go to college. A few weeks ago in March, the College Board also announced that they are giving four test report waivers to low-income high achieving students to encourage them to apply to four colleges, which is likely to improve college fit and student success. The College Board has made other changes recently to encourage more low-income and minority students to prepare for college and apply to institutions that meet their needs. Research has shown that highly prepared young women, Latina/o and other minority students sometimes do not apply to selective colleges even when they are well prepared to succeed there. This can limit not only their college options but prospects for future professional success.

So what is my take-away from this discussion and the HB 5 illustration? To better serve Latina/o and other community youth, we need to develop our understanding of how school issues impact college readiness and success. As a post-secondary educator, I am making time to study how local schools provide adult guidance for college to their students. In this way, I walk my talk by learning how I can be an effective partner to schools in my area, in order to promote college-going for Latino and other youth.

Can you take on an initiative in your area to promote student success along the school to college/university pathway?  Whether we are school or college educators, doing so will require that we study and learn more about the educational level that is different from the one in which we now work or in which we were trained. If we do, we can be better advocates for the educational success of our youth. Only our future depends on it.

References: Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (2000). Closing the Gaps: The Texas Higher Education Plan. Austin: THECB.

A native of Texas from the Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Maricela Oliva is Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her scholarly work focuses on issues impacting college access for students; namely, policy, race, class, first generation status, and school-university linkages. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the American Educational Research Association. With AERA she has served on national conference planning committees for Divisions J (Higher Education) and L (Policy) and was elected Council Member At Large for the 1800-member Division J (Postsecondary). Dr. Oliva serves or has served on four journal Editorial Boards, including The Review of Higher Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, and the Journal of Research on Leadership Education. She has published articles and chapters as well as a book, Leadership for Social Justice: Making Revolutions in Education, now in its second edition. She currently serves as an elected member of the Academic Assembly Council of The College Board.

From Repatriation to Representation: Latina/o Participation in Detroit Electoral Politics

2 Replies

by Elena Herrada

I am an elected member of the Detroit School Board under an emergency manager. I am also a candidate for Detroit’s 6th Representative District. Entering the race is a victory in itself. I am running without the giant funding the other candidates have, but I am running as an act of public service, to speak truth, to stand up for our elders who were intimidated out of public participation and remained private. It was during the late 1970s in the Chicano Boricua Studies classes at Wayne State University (CBS-WSU) in Detroit that classmates and I began to put together the story of this intimidation. We began to understand what happened to our families and why they acted as they did. This became essential to understanding where we are now and how it came to be that we have so little political power in Detroit and Michigan.

Mexicans began arriving in Detroit en masse around 1920 to respond to a call by Henry Ford’s auto plants. The promise of $5.00 per day and the chaos of the Mexican Revolution converged to send Mexicans north.  Approximately 15,000 Mexicans came to Detroit, including my grandparents. My grandfather married my grandmother, Elisa Hernandez Carranza in San Antonio Texas where she had been working as a governess for an American family who had brought her from Mexico to care for their children.  He worked on the railroad in New York and in Kansas and was drafted into World War I.

Here in Detroit, they started their family. My grandfather was fortunate to get hired by Ford, but with uncertain times, he was laid off in 1922. He worked odd jobs to support the growing family. When the Depression hit, as we have now learned, the welfare department came knocking on Mexican’s doors. Their four children were born in Detroit already when the deportations came.

Between 1929 and 1939, one million Mexicans – 60% of who were born in the US – were “repatriated.”  This is not the word for all; many who were born here and kicked out were depatriated, a word now used in our research of this sad period. This was done through a program cooked up  and never codified into law – to scapegoat a people and blame them – the most vulnerable and conspicuous (race, culture, language), rather than an economy built on a house of cards in a system riddled with contradiction and greed. A discussion for another time, but noteworthy here, is a comparison to today’s Detroit pensioners and the privatization of our city. Nearly identical play books were used for the hate mongering justification of removal of a people through state power and theft of pensions.  Racism is an essential for carrying off such a feat.

My family, like thousands of others, went back to Mexico. I have spent my life getting this story. Mexican Detroit was hardest hit between 1930 and 1932 because of industry recruitment in the better days of the early 1920s; so there were many to seek and many to deport.  It was when I was in the CBS-WSU program in the late 1970s that I learned about the repatriation from reading  Abraham Hoffman’s “Unwanted Mexican Americans.” When our little local Detroit Oral History Committee, made up of repatriados and descendants reached out to scholars Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, they came to Detroit for a book signing and then wrote a second edition with much of their research on Detroit included. 

We do not know how many of those repatriated returned.  We do know that many died along the way back and that many did not come back to Detroit; they went to other cities. Others returned during the Bracero Programs and found out then that they were US born repatriados. We lost track of thousands of our people in that decade and beyond. Children born here were not always told they were US citizens and lived their entire lives without ever claiming their birthright.

It was in the 1970s that the Chicano Movement gave rise to our pride. It was a time when we realized that our elders had been treated badly for things they did nothing to deserve and that our culture and language were to be embraced, not rejected. And it was a time for a new influx of Latina/os. In 1974, there were demands for bilingual education in the schools and Michigan passed the law for bilingual education.

Because we were based in an auto industry where no formal education was needed to make a good living, we had few Chicano or Latino people to fill the jobs of bilingual teachers and administrators. Detroit was considered the Promised Land because one could come here and change one’s life without changing one’s class. Thus, we had few college grads that could be teachers. Chicanos/as arrived in Detroit from Texas, California and New Mexico to fill the need. The 60s and 70s in Detroit, like the rest of the world, ushered in a new day for many oppressed peoples. Latinos here saw the passage of the Bilingual Education Act, the creation of new community based organizations run for and by Latinos and the creation of Latino en Marcha, later to become CBS-WSU. Many of today’s agency directors came through this important leadership/ academic program.

Among the organizations that came into existence in a heavily Mexican and Latino populated southwest Detroit were:  LASED (Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development), SER, (Service, Employment, Rehabilitation), CHASS Clinic (Community Health and Social Services) and Latino Family Services.

LASED was created as an incubator to start other projects. Its mission was to get Latinos included in positions where we had previously been excluded: government, civil service and education. It was the primary advocacy agency that sued the State Department of Education for failure to provide language instruction to Spanish speaking students, thus ushering in bilingual education. There was an active Brown Beret chapter here as well as a thriving UFW boycott office. The UAW was a strong supporter of the farm workers, so our autoworker parents were part of the growing UFW movement for justice in the fields. We were part of a movement that uplifted us; no more hiding who we were.

At the same time these organizations were forming, another community organization formed called Southwest Mental Health (SMH), now known as Southwest Solutions (SS). Its director, unlike the Latino agencies, was and is non-Latino. It is important, also to note that most of the people who started these organizations in the 70s are still there, either as board members or as directors. In 1979 SMH began to expand its mission into housing. It has since acquired hundreds of properties located in the Latino community and again expanded its mission far beyond mental health. It includes its own housing office, real estate corporation, construction company, its own mortgage lender and educational contracts and has also expanded into health care, having opened its own clinic in SW Detroit.

An elder activist in our community, Sister Consuelo Alcala asked me to look into why the Latino agencies were losing so much ground to SS. She had been part of the creation of the agencies and was concerned that the existing Latino agencies were receiving very little funding now from their traditional sources: the United Way of Southeastern Michigan, the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, etc. While the buildings and the organizations still exist, they are shadows of their former selves. The services once offered by LaSED, CHASS, SER, Latino Family Services all are now offered by the mega non-profit Southwest Solutions, who are also the largest landlord in the community.

I set out to interview the directors of the agencies, not sure how to approach an issue which many in our community had quietly complained about for years. We decided the best way to present our findings was to hold a hearing on the issue of hegemony in SW Detroit. This is where we learned how much influence the philanthropic world truly wields in Detroit and its negative impact on the Latino community as well as its impact on our ability to get our own people elected to office.

Our first Detroit Latin/o elected to office was Representative Belda Garza D-8th District in 1998. She was a determined political outsider who won, making history for Detroit. Her second term she ran unopposed, but the third term she was beat by a non-Latino, followed by his staff person who were both term-limited. The now heir apparent in the race is also non-Latina/o. Lots more money than our community has ever seen is in the mix now. Very little is left of public life in Detroit. As we speak, our trash pick up has been privatized, our water is about to be seized and pensions are up for grabs. The Detroit News reported that the heads of the foundations that rule Detroit met with the bankruptcy judge but because they are private entities, they do not have to report what they talked about. Our lives. Privatized. I mention this because our political races have been privatized; the non profits  (banks in drag) control all public life.

My first action as an elected school board member was to stop the efforts of the non-profits that went to city council and asked them to abolish the school board and put it under mayoral control, the first move before dismantling public education and parceling it out to charter schools. Jones Day, a bankruptcy law firm has replaced the government in Detroit; there is a  possibility of taking away Detroiters’ pensions to pay illegal swap loans to the banks it represents. I am running as an act of public service. To speak truth, to stand up for our elders who were intimidated out of public participation. Entering the race is a victory in itself, a victory of embracing public participation.

[1]  B alderamma, Francisco E, and Raymond Rodriguez.  Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New

Mexico Press, 2006. 

Elena Herrada  is a lifelong, second and one half generation Detroiter and daughter of a repatriado family (Detroit-Aguas Calientes-Detroit). Herrada is the daughter, granddaughter and mother of auto workers and an urban activist, critic and feminist. She is a co-founder of Fronteras Norteñas, an organization which chronicles the life of Mexicans in Michigan and a co-founder of Centro Obrero de Detroit, an immigrant rights organization formed in 2006. Herrada teaches at Wayne County Community College, volunteers with LASED ( Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development) teaching ESL and worker rights. She is currently running for State Representative in House District 6 on a platform of defense of public education and freedom from emergency managers for all communities of color and the restoration of their voting rights.

Remembering Nelson Mandela

3 Replies
11206285456_6b5da7bb8f_z(1)
Photo by Flickr User HelenSTB
CC BY-SA 2.O

by Inés Hernandez-Avila

I wrote this poem for Nelson Mandela in 1988 because he truly moved me, all along the path of his life as I began to know about him, and his spirit will continue to move me, always.  The poem speaks for me of what I think of him.  He was a great Spirit who came to this earth to be Nelson Mandela, and he kept the radiance he brought with him from the spirit lands of the ancestors.  With the example of his life, he “lifted us up,” as my own Nez Perce elder, Albert Andrews would say.  I have read the poem at literary events, but it has never been published.  On the occasion of Mandela’s death, my dear colleague, Jualynne Dodson asked, on the Ford Foundation Fellows listserv, what the impact of Mandela had been on the Chicana/o community.  I sent her my poem, from my own Native (Nez Perce) and Tejana perspective.  As I re-read what I had written in 1988, I saw that everything that I wrote for him all these years ago, still holds true.  And I did write the poem while listening to Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano composition, “Mandela.”  Ibrahim, moved by Mandela, composed his piece, and I was moved by the beautiful music for this great human being, this Maestro, who brought his light to the world.  It is a poem from my heart.

For Nelson–Leader, Tribal Person, Elder*

Summer 1988, on the occasion of Mandela’s 70th birthday, when the South African government offered him a six hour visit with his family

Oh Mandela, Mandela

I sing your name

in the name of all peoples locked in and up

in their very cells

weighed down by all the forces

that do not want their hearts light

and spirits lifted

Nelson, Nelson

Triumph is a sweet song

the one you know

saxaphones jubilant for your spirit

concentrating

in your space

to will your conscious waking

sleeping dreams

for all of us to see

And it is hard, Mandela, Mandela

Six hours offered you with family

with Winnie and your daughters

six hours to hold each other

gulp in every detailed facet

talk with hands eyes ears mouth

nose smiles tears

as if the heart of the very mother earth

would burst with joy at such a moment

but this joy cannot be

it is, as you say, not possible

for you are not alone

but one of oh so many whose pain like yours

meted out minutely daily

seeks to engulf you in despair

This visit offered is not to them

but to you

And what is six hours in the face of terror centuries old

horror with the face of most intentional genocide?

Six hours more or less of time

when in those same six hours

Children, little children

sit, like you, in other prison cells for their “subversion”

When heads are cracked and bodies wracked

across the landscape of a continent that is yours theirs

A motherland keeps count of each heart battered to a bloody pulp

to stop its count of life

And you know, too, that count

So you stop the maddened offer of a visit

What would you have said, Mandela, Mandela?

“Shall we have tea, Winnie?

Daughters, rub my back, I am so sore.

What shall we talk about?”

And in the next cells casually inflicting itself

in studied vehemence on seemingly countless others

the obscenity of racial/cultural boundless hatred

Nelson, Nelson

A visit?

We are visiting for you all over the world

for you and with you in our homes your face shines

from  the walls of our hearts

Poets gather to sing for you

Peoples gather to struggle with you

Workers pass the light of your name from mouth to mouth

Races, classes and sexes unite for you and for the people

Children learn of you and of the brave children

through whose eyes and spirits we find courage

Agelessness is where principled commitment is born and lives

Even in the splattered, broken bones of death

that wants so badly to detain the march of liberation

in all its splendor

Mandela, Mandela

you are real

The people you stand firm for are real and true

The visionary will outlast the cynic, the impotent and depraved

It is a matter of time

Only a small matter of time

The freedom spirit is soaring from heart to heart

around the world

To stop for six hours for convenience?

No, Nelson, Nelson

How you knew how time is precious

How you knew to keep on soaring

Oh, Mandela, Mandela

Keep on soaring

*With thanks to Abdullah Ibrahim, because this poem was written to his composition “Mandela.”

©Inés Hernández-Avila 1988

Inés Hernández-Avila is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC-Davis, where she is also Co-Director of the UC-Davis Social Justice Initiative. She has been involved in creating both the MA and PhD program in Native American Studies at UC-Davis. Her research and teaching focuses on indigenous literatures of the Americas and Chicana literature and feminism.

 

Chapina 2.0: Reflections of A Central American Solidarity Baby

1 Reply

May 13, 2013

Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú visits Los Angeles, CA, and tells her story at an event organized by the Guatemalan Information Center. Norma Chinchilla, the author’s mother, translates. Circa 1982. (Photo courtesy of Maya Chinchilla.)

Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú visits Los Angeles, CA, and tells her story at an event organized by the Guatemalan Information Center. Norma Chinchilla, the author’s mother, translates. Circa 1982. (Photo courtesy of Maya Chinchilla.)

By Maya Chinchilla

“Knowing the truth may be painful, but it is without any doubt, highly healthy and liberating” –Slain Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, 1998

In the 1980s, my parents and a group of Guatemalan exiles founded the Guatemalan Information Center, a human rights and solidarity organization focused on international solidarity with Central America. They showed documentaries like When the Mountains Tremble and slide shows to raise awareness about the extreme human rights violations in Guatemala, which were enacted with the complicity of the U.S. government under the Regan administration. They spent nights and weekends organizing events and staffing literature tables all over Los Angeles, often accompanied by guest speakers, music, art and food.  I vividly remember the leaflets and flyers, permeated with the smell of mimeograph ink, and small newsletters that they learned to typeset themselves. Like other dedicated organizers, my parents didn’t have a regular bedtime.  I remember my sister and I found places to sleep in corners of the room when meetings would go on late into the night. I have written about this experience in my poem, “Solidarity Baby,” in which I call my home a “Central American underground railroad,” or a place where refugees and exiles rested after running for their lives.

I grew up hearing about dictators such as Jose Efraín Ríos Montt, a cruel army general who, after leading an internal coup became the de-facto president in 1982. He is only one of many U.S. supported military regimes that took leadership after the years following a U.S.-backed military coup in 1954. This same general and former president was recently on trial for crimes against humanity and for helping to design and execute the scorched earth policy that resulted in the Maya genocide during the 1980s, the most brutal period of Guatemala’s 36-year war. This historic trial marks the first time a former head of state has been convicted of genocide in his own country and is the result of years of struggle from many, like my parents, who never thought they would see this day.

I was five or six years old the first time I saw When the Mountains Tremble, a powerful documentary about the repression of indigenous Guatemalans by the military dictatorship and the ways in which Mayan and Ladino Guatemalans organized themselves to resist repression and to work for much-needed fundamental social and economic reforms. We watched it in my living room, where organizers and friends sat on couches, folding chairs, and even on the floor and leaning up against each other in anticipation of the story of the film. As a dreamy yet observant kid, tiny for my age, I would casually slip in and out of the room without much notice. Curled up in my mother or my father’s lap, I would listen to the rise and fall of their breathing, their hearts pounding as their words echoed through their chest discussing the issues at hand.

Then there he was, Ríos Montt, his face huge on the screen, smiling, overly confident, invoking the name of God and talking as though Jesus himself had blessed his crusade to protect the US and Guatemalan elite interests from the poverty-stricken masses. What I remember most vividly from the film was the sound of the military helicopters: chocka chocka chocka chocka. They were the same grayish green ones I saw in the TV show M.A.S.H. and in movies about the U.S. military in Korea or Vietnam.  I still jump at the sound of thunderous helicopter blades, not because of their use by police in Long Beach, where I grew up, or in the Bay Area, where I now live; it is because of images and sounds of helicopters used by repressive armies against Mayan villagers that are so deeply engraved in my memory.

These memories come in bits and pieces, but what is always present is the feeling of anxiety, the intensity of the silences, the power of the personal testimonies, and the sense of the life and death urgency of the times. While I may not have understood the complexities of dictatorship, repression, organized resistance, and the U.S.’s assistance to authoritarian governments at a young age, I did understand that there were things that should not or could not be said at school or with other family members because they might not understand or, worse, might think of us as “commie sympathizers” and potentially disclose things that might endanger others’ lives.  These included horrific stories of torture, mutilation, death squads, disappearances, and images of bodies left in public places—that is what happened to people who spoke out, and this filled me with fear.  Of course, there were stories of heroism and bravery and stories about the importance of individual sacrifice for a better life for future generations. Yet the images of repression were so powerful they accompanied me as I went back and forth from the refuge of my home into the world.

At times I feel I absorbed my parents’ anxieties and none of their political training or coping skills. This is the trauma that I believe has been inherited by many of us who are second-generation Central Americans, who were either born over there and left very young or born in the U.S. like me, who did not experience the violence first hand. The impact of the war lives on in our silences and is only healed by knowing the truth, telling our stories in all their complexities and cultivating our creative imagining of a more just and boundless future.

It was not until I had the opportunity to research and write about my family history in college that I was finally able to articulate the weight I had felt all my life and the urgency to put the pieces of my memory together. I found other Central American students—or rather they found me—the majority 1.5-ers who came very young from Guate or El Salvador, who shared their stories and asked me about mine. It was the first time people asked me questions about what I thought about my identity and history and the first time I felt they wanted to listen. I read Central American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican and other Latin American poets. I found myself in the margins between Spanish and English. It was then that I first wrote a poem called “Central American-American,” yearning for my own cultural movement to find names for this 2nd generation experience.

As Guatemalans are apt to do with their corny and dark multilayered humor-coping mechanism, I often joke about our collective skittish Central American paranoia or the worry, the caution, the mistrust: the way I was taught to always know where my shoes were at night in case we had to just get up and go; the lectures from my parents on how to answer the phone and who was allowed to pick me up at school; my training to remember specific numbers for emergencies, to avoid saying too much; that everyone was shady until proven otherwise and the way every time we went to Guate, I was told that being too “Gringa” could get me in trouble, but how the act of forgetting and not asking too many questions could also keep me safe. Some of this was the usual conversation for cautious parents to have with their elementary-school-aged, latch-key kids, but I knew for us it was more than that.

Today, just hearing any little thing about Guatemala in the news as a 2.0 Chapina causes my body to tense in places. Some of that tension is actually excitement that we will finally be able to hear more of the truth, that others will understand our collective intensity around the need to know more, the hunger to find justice and move beyond only speaking of the violence to never forget, so as to never let it happen again. And now, more recently, I continue to put the pieces together when I share my writing with others and show my own students’ documentaries like When the Mountains Tremble.  Showing films like this one still cause me anxiety and sadness; but, more than anything now, I choke up with emotion when I think about the incredible strength and resiliencies of those that have survived to tell these stories.

I still remember the sound of the Quiché-Maya accented Spanish of Rigoberta Menchú, the young narrator of the documentary, with her bright, focused eyes and hands folded calmly in her lap. Her words were interspersed with the sounds of the boots of the fresh–faced, idealistic guerilla fighters, mostly indigenous men and women, hiking through the mountains, sharing their dreams about the more peaceful and humane world they hoped to create for future generations. I remember the deep baritones of the cocky generals explaining the importance of resisting the supposedly Cuban-influenced “subversives” and the face of the often Mayan-descended young military soldiers with their M-15 rifles, looking like they could be the children or brothers of the dead villagers and the wailing mothers.

It is with the same combination of pride and deep sorrow that I watched the trial against Rios Montt, an unprecedented historic event, in which survivors of the violence and genocide, along with hundreds of expert witnesses, have been documenting their stories and presenting evidence for crimes against humanity in a court of law and as a matter of public record, in hopes of finally bringing the perpetrators of the violence to justice.
There have been many moments of frustration and dramatic attempts at disrupting the proceedings of this trial. But the trial and what it symbolizes for so many people in Guatemala and outside the country who have remained persistent—from those who experienced the violence first hand–to the documentarians, the forensic investigators, the writers, the scholars, the organizations such as the ones my parents were involved in—this day feels like a small yet definite triumph. One of the most powerful moments of the trial came when more than 30 Mayan-Ixil women, with their heads half covered in traditional weavings to protect their identity, testified in court to the systematic rape they experienced and witnessed, the dismemberment, murder of children, family and wiping out entire villages. They had survived to tell the truth and were willing to continue risking their lives to do so.

This trial is not about revenge. Nothing can bring back the dead or heal the trauma inflicted upon a generation of people.  Instead, this is an opportunity to record the truth as public record in a Latin American country that has never witnessed anyone brought to justice within its own borders, where perpetrators continue to act with impunity. This is an opportunity to break the silence, however long it takes, to declare, as has been repeated over and over: Sí hubo genocidio. Yes. There was a genocide in Guatemala.

As physically and emotionally hard as it has been to write this, I feel that by telling my story, I access a ounce of the strength of the many people I saw give their personal testimony over the years. This is an act of bearing witness, telling you, “I experienced this with my own eyes.” It disrupts the silences and the official stories that seek to erase the personal toll, each of the individual human beings and their suffering. It also testifies to the generations of colonial violence and racism that continues today.  Finally, it accounts for the feelings of madness that come along when you are obsessed with telling the truth and hoping someone will hear you; hoping that more people will act, yet realizing that you can’t wait for anyone to tell your story for future generations.  So many overwhelming feelings after the announcement that Rios Montt has indeed been sentenced and found guilty. After so much time and so much struggle I feel a sense of a momentary relief, a moment of justice after so much sorrow and loss at such a high human cost. All this fighting for truth, reconciliation and justice has not been in vain.

BEFORE THE SCALES, TOMORROW

By Otto Rene Castillo
(Guatemalan Poet of the Committed Generation)

And when the enthusiastic
story of our time
is told,
for those
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
—those who have suffered most from it.
And that
being ahead of your time
means suffering much from it.
But it’s beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.
And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it’s all still so cold,
so dark.

Maya Chinchilla is a poet, filmmaker, and educator, who has taught English at the Peralta Colleges and Latina/o Studies at San Francisco State University. Currently, she is working on her first poetry manuscript for Kórima Press. www.mayachapina.com

Comment(s):

  2. Miriam    May 21, 2013 at 1:01 PM

    thank you for writing this, maya. putting together the puzzle of who you are. where you come from. the mountain trembling weight your name hefts. linked to the blood chilling images from the dictator’s trial. all power to the women & men of fire and heart who would not be silenced or shamed. wishing them & their babies & their dreams bulletproof protection. wishing you love & delight in your newfound voice. xoxo, miriam

  3. Sara Ramirez    May 13, 2013 at 6:42 PM
    Maya, thank you for your beautiful words of wisdom and for the corazón you put into this piece.
  4. Rio Yañez    May 13, 2013 at 7:23 PM
    Maya, thank you for showing your reflections on this profound moment in history. International solidarity means that our personal experiences with politics, movements, and trauma have equal weight across borders. Keep telling your story!

  5. Anonymous    May 14, 2013 at 1:55 AM
    Yes indeed! No matter what happens after this conviction was delivered in the case of Genocide in Guatemala, or whether more political recourse will be waged as a tool for perpetual impunity in Guatemala, many facts will remain true no matter what. One of them, the VOICE of Guatemalan Mayan women were spoken and heard across the world. A testament to the courage of Ixil women, proof that not even genocide was able to silent them.

  6. ¡Exactamente! No importa que pase después de esta convicción en el caso de Genocidio en Guatemala, o qué otros recursos técnico legales son usados como herramienta para perpetuar la impunidad en Guatemala, ya que los hechos son auto evidentes sin importar que hagan. Uno de estos hechos es que las VOCES de la mujeres Mayas guatemaltecas hablaron y fueron escuchadas en todo el mundo. Como testamento de la valentía de la mujer Ixil, prueba que ni siquiera el genocidio pudo apagar sus voces.

  7. Sonia    May 14, 2013 at 12:48 PM

    beautiful, honest, sad, joyful, history, beautiful

  8. Unknown    May 14, 2013 at 1:19 PM

    Maya, thank you. Thank you for existing as you are, and for openign to the sharing of your story. Please, keep story-ing.

    This piece left me speechless, and streaming sweet tears of sorrow amongst the genocide that ravages the Americas. I am grateful for the soul-heart-psychic-work you do daily, breath by breath, cuz it seems necessary to nourish the courage and genius required to weave together words as story as reprieve and inspiration to keep struggling, such as you have here.

    Also – I’m in a PhD program in Urban Planning, a place where I am exploring genocide in the Americas. That institutional program has been a seed for something else, a parallel universe Planning as Poetry PhD program, that is being birthed with coaching by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and in collaboration with other folks. Right now, our workshops are exploring forced movement in relation to settler colonialism and being 1.5ers living in the U.S. I’d love to share this piece for us workshoppers to read together. THANK YOU!

  9. Anonymous    May 14, 2013 at 11:28 PM

    On Friday, May 10, when Efrain Rios Montt’s verdict was read, Judge Jazmin Barrios stated: “The crime of genocide affects all Guatemalans, because it damaged the social fabric of the country.” The genocide, Barrios added, caused multi-generational pain, trauma and damages. And it is this multi-generational impact of the genocide that my colleague and friend Maya Chinchilla eloquently expresses in her essay “Chapina 2.0: Reflections of A Central American Solidarity Baby”. Gracias!

  10. Pamela Yates    May 15, 2013 at 8:57 AM

    Maya, it is so gratifying to know that our film WHEN THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE had this effect on you and helped make you the wonderful woman, the writer you are today. I wanted to let you know that WHEN THE MTS. TREMBLE and GRANITO DE ARENA (the sequel) are now streaming online free on PBS in both English and Spanish right here.
    http://www.pbs.org/pov/granito/watch-when-the-mountains-tremble-online.php#.UZOvviv72K8
    We’re doing this to commemorate the guilty verdict for Ríos Montt. We also have put up filmed moments from inside the genocide trial DICTATOR IN THE DOCK right here
    http://www.granitomem.com Please get in touch with me. I want to know you. Pamela Yates, Director, “When the Mts. Tremble” pamela@skylightpictures.com

  11. Clarissa Rojas    May 17, 2013 at 1:51 PM

    you brought us into the living words of witness.
    Ixil woman says during the trial: “even assuming that the General Rios Montt stays in jail, he will be fed every night, what about us? We still have to worry about whether we will die of hunger.”  this is a historic moment on which the work to address the legacies and continuities of colonial and neo-colonial violence in Guatemala builds. the mic is turned way up on the everyday enactments of genocide and feminicide. solidarity starts with gesturing toward listening. gracias maya. may all the words that beckon to be spoken arise and guide the tasks before us all.

  12. Luz Vazquez-Ramos    May 29, 2013 at 8:01 PM

    Well done Mayita! Keep telling your story.

  13. MARLENE LEGASPI    June 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM

    I always feel blessed when I have an opportunity to read another person’s words and how they depict such an immovable, intricate and complex aspect of their experience and identity. I really appreciate you pointing to trauma children retain into adulthood when much of their residual emotions may be based on memories and the stories they were told. My mother once told me during WWII that a special siren would go off when she was a little girl in grade school informing everyone that the Japanese military were coming to abduct children to force them into sexually slavery, and how routine it was for them to hide and when I remember her story the exact emotion I had from such a visceral account comes right back to me, as if it ever really left. But thank you for sharing this! Thank you.

  14. Cyber Chapina    June 27, 2013 at 6:29 PM

    I want to thank you all for your own powerful comments, for reading and sharing this essay, for the encouragement and incredible response, and to MALCS Mujeres Talk blog for the editorial support in the writing of this piece. Although the trial has been partially annulled and is for the time being on hold, I still believe all this work and sacrifice has not been in vain. I originally wrote this not knowing what the out come would be but still with the urgency to write and put these pieces together.I was hesitant in my own celebration but found it necessary to celebrate each victory no matter how big or small, no matter how many steps forward or back we may feel this process has taken all of us. The resilience of those who continue to fight for justice remind me that there are those of us who can not give up. Failure is a luxury. Survival is a victory in and of itself and our cultures and people deserve to heal, thrive in order to change the status quo. Please keep an eye on this important international in internal work being done in Guatemala as well as supporting the diaspora in telling their stories too. Un abrazo. http://www.riosmontt-trial.org/

  15. Roberto Lovato    July 4, 2013 at 2:49 PM

    A few months after you shared this piece,I finally took it out of bookmarks and read it. Well done, Maya. Helped me better understand the tragi-heroic drip of our very violent, very inspired political legacy on the 1.5-2.0 generations. Difficult but necessary to write. I hope it inspires other young people to write because Gerardi was and is write about painful truth. Was glad to see the pic of yer Mom w/ Rigoberta. Thanks for writing and sharing. Un abrazo, R

Domestic Workers, Dignity and a Daughter’s Story

1 Reply

January 28, 2013

From left to right: Translator (name unknown), Maria Reyes of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Guillermina Castellanos of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, panel moderator Kathy Coll of Stanford University. Photo by author.

From left to right: Translator (name unknown), Maria Reyes of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Guillermina Castellanos of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, panel moderator Kathy Coll of Stanford University. Photo by author.

By Seline Szkupinski Quiroga, Ph.D.

Last November in Oakland, at the meetings of the National Women’s Studies Association, I attended a session entitled “Imagining New Solutions for Old Problems: Domestic Workers Create Networks – Transforming the Struggle for Social and Economic Justice”. The panel offered academic, activist, and worker voices reflecting on the current state of labor activism in a field comprised largely of immigrant women.

Historian Eileen Boris provided a context for current struggles as she outlined the dialectical history of strikes (protests) and standards (laws). Maria Reyes of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (an immigrant rights organization) and the National Domestic Workers Alliance described initiatives such as the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights which would have given housekeepers, childcare providers and home health care workers rights such as overtime pay, mandated meal and rest breaks, adequate sleeping conditions for live-in workers, and the right to use employers’ kitchens to cook their own food. (The bill was vetoed by Governor Brown).

Nicole Brown-Booker, a professional woman with a significant disability who must employ personal care attendants in order to live independently, spoke of Hand in Hand, a coalition of domestic workers and their employers working together to educate about and advocate for dignified and respectful working conditions. Pam Tau Lee, a long-time community and labor activist, shared her experience as a daughter now employing care workers for her elderly parents.

The entire session was inspiring and enlightening but it was these last two presenters who had the most impact on me. Their stories resonated with me because I have had experience with the ethical dilemmas associated with employing a home health care worker. My mother had Parkinson’s disease and osteoporosis. In her later years, she lived with my sister and her family as she was no longer able to live independently due to her frailty and advancing symptoms. My sister and her husband both worked fulltime and couldn’t provide the 24-hour care my mother needed.

As for many families in this situation, financial concerns were paramount. My mother had limited resources—social security, a small pension and some savings. She did not have long-term care insurance so while her health insurance covered a few hours of home health care, the majority was paid for out of pocket. Daunted by the task of finding qualified workers with experience and figuring out tax withholdings at the same time as learning about my mother’s rapidly changing needs, we decided to contract with a private company, and the monthly expense quickly mounted.

My mother immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. She was completely bilingual but as she aged, she was more comfortable expressing herself in Spanish. We were grateful to find home health care workers who could easily communicate with her in Spanish, but I was uncomfortably aware that the limited English abilities of some would limit their ability to advance or to be employed in other sectors. I learned that few companies provided opportunities for training and certification.

I have respect for the work of caring for others. It is not an easy job, and it is more than just providing another pair of hands. In my mother’s case, for example, it required confianza as workers helped her make purchases and with intimate daily tasks; and patience as the side effects of her medications—hallucinations and paranoia—caused personality changes. In one particularly difficult period, her aides would spend hours looking for something that had been ‘lost’ only to then be accused of theft. My sister, in addition to managing her own household, had to mediate these clashes.

Over the years that my mother needed home health care workers, we learned that of the daily amount she was charged, only a small portion actually went to the worker. I don’t know if this is standard or just a practice of the companies we dealt with. We wanted to pay a fair wage and give the work and care provided the dignity and value it deserved. At one point, we intervened when we found out that one of my mother’s aides was consistently receiving her paychecks late. The company’s proposed ‘solution’ was for my mother to buy out the worker’s contract at a cost of over $30,000. The situation was so messy we had to seek legal counsel. As my mother’s medical condition was rapidly declining, shifting from using a company to employing home health care workers directly would have meant finding a new team of workers who could attend to her needs, and forming new relationships at a time when stability was important.

The decision of what to do was eclipsed by my mother’s entrance into hospice.When my mother passed away, her home health care workers attended her memorial service, and I am still in contact with some of them as they share the accomplishments of their children and other milestones.

Domestic workers, such as the many women who helped my mother in her last years of life, provide vital services yet these workers often face unjust social and economic conditions. The industry is unregulated, domestic workers are excluded from the protections of federal wage-and-hour laws, and abuses are rampant. However, as the presenters in the session noted, the coalitions and networks that domestic workers are forming are having effect. In 2010, New York State passed the nation’s first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights into law. Although Governor Brown vetoed the California version, local organizations have not given up the fight. San Francisco’s Mujeres Unidas y Activas has developed an innovative worker-centered skills training, job placement and labor rights program called Caring Hands. A national campaign to coordinate efforts and educate the public called Caring Across Generations launched in 2011.

As our population ages, it is estimated that the number of people who will need care will only grow.[1] We may all face similar dilemmas, as we have to make decisions about a sick parent or partner who needs help. It is time to organize to change the current structures and policies. We must improve the working conditions and job quality of domestic workers but not at the risk of making such care inaccessible for low-income families.

Seline Szkupinski Quiroga is a child of immigrants and a medical anthropologist living in Phoenix, Arizona. She is a member of the Mujeres Talk Colectiva.

[1] Salinas, Robert. “Home Care.” Long-Term Care Medicine (2011): 3-14.

Comment(s):

  1. Elena Gutierrez    February 6, 2013 at 12:32 PM
    Thanks for your thoughts on the complex relations women face as both carefivers and receivers- roles we all play at some point in our lives. Do you have any resources that those of us who would like to keep up on these issues can use?
  2. Seline (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)    February 7, 2013 at 3:52 PM
    Hi Elena,
    In addition to the links in the essay, the websites of the following organizations will keep you up to date:
    National Domestic Workers Alliance
    http://www.nationaldomesticworkeralliance.org/
    Caring Across Generations
    http://www.caringacrossgenerations.org/
    The Domestic Employers Association
    http://domesticemployers.org/
    -ssq

Latinas and Roe v. Wade

1 Reply

January 21, 2013

Photo by We Are Woman, Aug 25, 2012, Flickr/Creative Commons License.

Photo by We Are Woman, Aug 25, 2012, Flickr/Creative Commons License.

By Elena R. Gutiérrez

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” MLK

In watching the unfolding online celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Roe v Wade  (January 22, 2013), it is undeniable that the voices of women of color have been present and impactful in changing the landscape of abortion organizing over the past four decades. While Planned Parenthood’s decision to step away from the pro-choice framework may be the most recent indicator that the mainstream reproductive rights movement has finally understood that for most women terminating a pregnancy is anything but a “choice,” I have been struck by several articles and blogs, more than ever before written by Latinas, commenting upon what this landmark legislation currently means for our communities.[1]

It is not that this is a new occurrence—Latinas have advocated for issues of reproductive health, including pregnancy termination, for longer than Roe v. Wade has been in existence. However, it has been refreshing to read a number of public opinions and perspectives that directly engage how and why abortion is significant in Latina lives; although all authors inevitably point out that what is popularly perceived as open access to abortion in the United States is hardly the reality for most Latinas. As one “Anonymous- Reproductive Justice Advocate” notes: “The legality of Roe v. Wade does not reflect our country’s culture where sex education is often times limited to abstinence-only, access to birth control and abortions services is disproportionate, and interactions perpetuate slut-bashing where sexually-active youth are labeled as ‘too sexual.'”[2]

While the anonymity of the author may signal how much further we have to go in creating social safety for the one in three women who have abortions, especially those who are young, her insights indicate how the politics of abortion go beyond legal access to the actual medical procedure and speak to the broader cultural context and economic circumstances within which women live. As reproductive justice advocates have argued for decades, it is only within this broader framework that we can speak about the significance of Roe v. Wade for Latinas.

The importance of financial access to abortion has in fact become memorialized internationally in the life of Rosie Jimenez, who is commonly believed to be the first known death by illegal abortion after the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1977.  Hyde cut off Medicaid funding for abortion to women on public assistance — women who by the government’s own definition cannot afford health care. Rosaura (Rosie) Jimenez, was a mother and college student living in McAllen, Texas, in the late 1970s.  The daughter of Mexican migrant farm-workers, Rosie was a single mother raising her 5-year-old daughter and also a student six months away from her teaching credential.

In her final semester of school, Rosie realized that she was once again pregnant. However, too financially strapped to pay for a safe and legal procedure at a clinic, she found a cheaper alternative. She ended up going to an illegal abortionist who used unsterilized instruments to complete her surgery. Within a week, Rosie suffered a painful death from an infection that ravaged her body. A $700 scholarship check was found in her purse when she died on October 3, 1977, at the age of 27. She could have used her college money for safe abortion care at a clinic, but she was saving it for her education.

Although it is almost thirty-five years after the death of Rosie Jimenez, the recently published commentary on Roe’s anniversary echo a reality that is still very common for Latinas in the US. In fact, more women than ever since the legalization of abortion will find themselves in the circumstances faced by Rosie Jimenez should they face an unintended pregnancy.[3] More Latinas (37 percent) are uninsured than women of any other racial or ethnic group, and more than a quarter of Latinas live in poverty.[4]  Despite the fact that they are also more likely to live in areas with poor access to family planning services, Latinas have abortions at disproportionate rates; with estimates of between 17-20% of women in the U.S. having abortions being Latina.[5] When we take into account the circumstances of newly immigrant Latinas, who have little financial and social assistance and may fear deportation, or dealing with providers who do not speak Spanish, the circumstances are even more challenging.

These numbers show that Catholic or not, Latinas do have abortions, not because they are making that “choice,” but for many, because the circumstances of their lives may offer no other choice. Moreover, current research suggests than rather than being staunchly against it, Latinos hold compassionate views about abortion.[6] But perhaps what is most notable at this particular moment is that Latinas continue to be at the forefront of reproductive health and justice organizing. From working for legal and policy change to providing health care and participating in grassroots mobilization, for over forty years these advocates have insisted that true reproductive “choice” necessitates an understanding of the many factors that impact women’s reproductive options.

While access to the termination of a pregnancy through legal abortion is critical, it is insufficient. True reproductive justice efforts must also strive to create a society in which any person has the freedom and resources to not have a child, or to have as many as they want. All people have the right to parent the children they have with full access to the social resources necessary to raise them in safe and healthy environments, without fear of violence from individuals or intervention by the government. This includes making assistive reproductive technologies available, funding education, investing in health care reform for all, ensuring food safety and security and prioritizing the unification of our families. That we guarantee all of these options for all people regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, or physical ability, is fundamental to creating true reproductive justice.

If you would like to learn more about Latinas and abortion, reproductive justice or efforts to end the Hyde Amendment:

1. Join the Strong Families tweet: What has Roe v. Wade meant for communities of color? Jan 22nd, 9am #Roeat40 #Roeat40chat

2. Participate in a “Talking About Abortion” e-LOLA (Latinas Organizing for Leadership and Advocacy) hosted by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (Jan. 22-23; offered in English and Spanish)

3.  If you can’t make the training above, you can refer to many bi-lingual fact sheets and policy analyses offered by the NLIRH at: www.latinainstitute.org/issues/abortion-access.

4. Find out about the abortion laws in your state, and the existence of an abortion fund (check out http://www.fundabortionnow.org/). These are the folks who will be able to assist someone in your area if needed and are a great resource.

5.  Find out if there is a reproductive justice organization in your state.  Volunteer, recommend, donate and keep connected to the issues.

 

Elena R. Gutiérrez is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-origin Women’s Reproduction, co-author of Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, and is a member of the Mujeres Talk Editorial Colectiva.

[1] For example: Strong Families, Still Wading: Forty Years of Resistence, Resilience and Reclamation in Communities of Color, www.reproductivejusticeblog.org, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice http: //www.californialatinas.org/a-young-latinas-reflection-on-choice; “Latino Attitudes on Abortion: Roe v Wade 40 years later. 1/17/13 www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/latino-daily-news/details

[2]  Anonymous, “A Young Latina’s Reflection on Choice,” California Latinas for Reproductive Justice http://www.californialatinas.org/a-young-latinas-reflection-on-choice)
[3] The Guttmacher Institute recently reported that during 2011 and 2012 more abortion restrictions were enacted in U.S. states than in at any other previous years. 2011 marked a record high, with 92 pieces of legislation being passed throughout the country. Guttmacher Institute, “2012 Saw Second-Highest Number of Abortion Restrictions Ever,” guttmacher.org.media/inthenews/2013/01/02/index.html. 1/2/13.
[4] Hope Gillette, “Cervical Cancer Awareness: Latinas At Greater Risk, ‘Third Most Likely Group To Die Of The Disease.” Huffington Post Online 1/14/2013.
[5] National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. (2004) “Latinas and Abortion Access: Issue Brief,” latinainstitute.org/sites/default/files/publications/AbortionIssueBrief.pdf.

[6] National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. (2011). “Latino Abortion Attitude Polling” http://latinainstitute.org/publications/Poll-Latino-Voters-Hold-Compassionate-Views-on-Abortion

Comment(s):
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer    January 25, 2013 at 5:29 AM

Thank you Elena for such a timely and powerful post. You remind us of the limits of liberal “rights” frameworks in erasing the barriers faced by poor women of color. People like to blame women’s “cultural” silence about sex in the family as the ultimate barrier to them seeking legal abortions, erasing the entire structure of poverty and lack of healthcare access. Another aspect of reproductive justice we need to fight against is the insidious way undocumented migrant parents are increasingly losing their children to child services and foster care. They are increasingly constructed as irresponsible parents – simply due to the fact that they do not speak English and because of the “risks” posed by being undocumented, which of course means today that they are likely to face prison time, detention, and deportation. Thank you for your post!