Category Archives: Latin America

Attorney Susana Prieto-Terrazas, a Champion for Maquiladora Worker’s Rights

Image provided by authors of poster calling for workers to join march.

Image provided by authors. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Marlene Flores and Miguel Juárez

The maquiladora industry has long impacted the border region, especially the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso region. With the passage of NAFTA, neoliberal economic policies that have encouraged the freer movement of goods and services across the border have especially encouraged the explosion of the maquiladora industry. In a maquiladora factory workers assemble part of a product (such as a car door handle) and the product is shipped to the final country destination where multiple parts will be put together for the finished product. Maquiladora factories do not have to reside on the border but many of them do because of their proximity to another country and trade laws. Though promising stable jobs and a healthy economy, this industry has had detrimental effects on the workers themselves. Still recovering from a sluggish economy and heavily hit by the cartel violence from its peak in 2010, the region where maquiladoras flourish provides plenty of employment opportunities. There are over 300 maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez that employ over 250,000 workers at substandard wages. Continue reading →

Reports from July 2016 Latina/o Studies Association Conference

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Panelists Beatriz Tapia, Alexandro Gradilla, Anita Tijerina Revilla, and Magdalena L. Barrera. Photo by M. Barrera. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Latina/o Studies Association 2016: Nourishing the Mind and the Spirit

By Magdalena L. Barrera

The 2016 LSA conference was a wonderful experience, for many reasons. To situate myself: I am a faculty member of the Mexican American Studies department at San José State University. My primary area of research is analysis of textual representations of Mexican Americans in early twentieth century American cultural production; however, in recent years I have developed a secondary research area that explores the retention and mentoring of first-generation and underrepresented students in higher education. This second area was inspired in part by the learning curve I underwent as my environment changed from the R1 settings of my undergraduate through postdoctoral training to working in the California State University system. Although I have maintained my primary research area, it requires some effort to stay in touch with emerging trends in the field, as I am the only person at SJSU who does Humanities-based work in Chicanx Studies. Moreover, I had not attended a conference in a couple of years, and so I welcomed this year’s LSA as an opportunity to fully engage as both a presenter and participant, and to expand my professional network. Continue reading →

Zika and Abortion

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The sign says “Stop Criminalizing Women.” The woman belongs to a protest movement in Chile, which, like El Salvador, has draconian laws that criminalize women who terminate their pregnancy. In both countries abortion is illegal under all circumstances, even if necessary to save the life of the woman. In El Salvador the exception that allowed abortion when the mother’s life is in danger was removed in 1998; in Chile it was removed under the military dictatorship in 1989.

by Ann Hibner Koblitz

(This essay was originally published on February 1, 2016 on the author’s blog: “Sex, Abortion, and Contraception”)

The spread of the Zika virus is causing consternation and alarm in many countries. The symptoms of the mosquito-borne virus are generally quite mild, to the extent that many victims don’t even know that they are ill. Recently, however, it has become clear that, when contracted by women in the first trimester of pregnancy, Zika can cause birth defects such as microcephaly, brain damage, deafness, and paralysis. The World Health Organization has stated that as many as four million people in the Americas could be infected in 2016, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are cautioning pregnant women not to travel to certain countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where the virus outbreak is becoming severe.

The Central American country of El Salvador has been particularly hard hit, and the government has taken the unprecedented step of warning women not to become pregnant until 2018. This advice is bizarre. El Salvador is a poor country. Many women face barriers, both practical and cultural, to contraceptive use. Moreover, abortion — even when the fetus is known to be severely deformed — is illegal, and the punishments are severe.

An effective government strategy to combat the epidemic of birth defects would consist of three components: widespread sex education and cheap and easily available contraception; widely available prenatal screening for birth defects (amniocentesis); and safe, legal abortion. Since El Salvador has none of these, women in large numbers will inevitably get pregnant, and some will deliver babies with severe abnormalities.

Note that the government’s admonitions are not directed at men, as if they didn’t realize that men share responsibility for pregnancy. Rather, the clear implication is that women and women alone will be blamed for the expected public health catastrophe. A 25 January 2016 article in The New York Times about the Zika threat in El Salvador aptly describes the Salvadoran government’s pregnancy warning as “the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass that, to many here, only illustrates their government’s desperation.”

In this article the word “abortion” is conspicuous by its absence. This is a peculiar oversight by The New York Times, since the illegality of all abortion in El Salvador is one of the principal obstacles to an effective response to the public health crisis.

Also omitted from the coverage in The New York Times is any discussion of U.S. culpability for the deplorable situation in that country. During the years 1979-1992 the U.S. gave billions of dollars in financial and military aid to the right-wing government that committed large-scale atrocities during a civil war in which an estimated 80 thousand people died. After the war the huge quantity of weapons and the large number of demobilized and unemployed former soldiers set the stage for an epidemic of violent crime. In addition, in the mid-1990s the U.S. deported several thousand Salvadoran pandilleros (gang members, mainly from Southern California), who brought their criminal gangs back with them to El Salvador. Current estimates of the number of gang members in El Salvador (a country having 1/50 the population of the U.S.) range from 30 to 60 thousand. At present El Salvador has the highest homicide rate in the Americas.

The pandilleros are not the only U.S. export to cause havoc in El Salvador. Over the past two decades religious fundamentalist groups based in or funded from the U.S. have given rise to anti-abortion fanaticism on a level that was virtually unknown before. In 1994 the Kovalevskaia Fund (of which I am director) and the Salvadoran Women Doctors’ Association convened an international conference in San Salvador to discuss the medical consequences of illegally induced abortion. El Salvador’s Vice-Minister of Health attended, and topics included the use of herbal abortifacients and menstrual regulators by the indigenous peoples of El Salvador, the actions of RU-486, the efficiency of vacuum aspiration as an abortion technique, the work of South American abortion clinics and their education programs for midwives and obstetricians, and so on. There was a sprinkling of anti-abortion people among the 300 doctors and medical students in attendance, but discussions were wide-ranging and respectful. Yes, that is not a misprint. The abortion opponents in El Salvador listened to the discussions of these topics with interest and respect.

Now, however, such an event would be virtually impossible to organize because religious fundamentalists have become much more visible, violent, and well-funded than they were in the mid-1990s. Medical personnel are prevented from performing abortions even in cases of ectopic pregnancy or other life-threatening conditions. In such circumstances it is not surprising that the Salvadoran government fails to mention abortion in connection with the Zika crisis. That The New York Times fails to mention abortion in its own coverage is harder to explain.

Postscript (added 4 February 2016) Although the article on the response in El Salvador to the Zika virus did not mention abortion at all, a 3 February editorial in The New York Times did: “In Latin America, where many nations outlaw abortion, some governments have advised that pregnancies be delayed, which can create only greater anxiety for women who have sadly limited control over such decisions…. Immediate responses, like increasing access to birth control and abortion, face stiff legal and cultural resistance in the affected region.” The New York Times also carried an article “Surge of Zika Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining Strict Abortion Laws”.

Second postscript (added 8 February 2016) Today’s The New York Times has an excellent op-ed on the situation in Brazil by Debora Diniz, a professor of law at the University of Brasilia.

Ann Hibner Koblitz, Professor of Women and Gender Studies, has taught at ASU since 1998. Her first book was the biography of a Russian woman mathematician, feminist and writer. Her second book examined the lives of the first group of Russian women to receive their doctorates in the sciences and medicine. Her most recent book, Sex and Herbs and Birth Control: Women and Fertility Regulation through the Ages (Kovalevskaia Fund, 2014) received the 2015 Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award from the Institute for Humanties Research at ASU. She also directs a small non-profit foundation for women in science in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and her blog, “Sex, Abortion, and Contraception,” can be found at http://ahkoblitz.wordpress.com.

Artists in the Americas Confront the Fracturing Effects of Violence

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Audience on stage set with actors. Pequeños Territorios en Recconstrucción by Teatro Línea de Sombra. Jan 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-NC 2.0

by Theresa Delgadillo

Strong Women?

Narratives of supposedly “strong” women who almost unwillingly enter into drug trafficking proliferate in the world of telenovelas, such as Reina del Sur, Señora Acero, and La Viuda Negra. Indeed, Telemundo advertises its television programs with the tagline: “nuestras protagonistas no se la pasan llorando” (translation: “our protagonists aren’t crybabies”). While not writing directly about these particular telenovelas, or the roles of women in them, Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez observes that a shift in telenovela narratives has occurred: the celebrated subject of these narratives is no longer the poor servant who marries the wealthy son of the household or discovers that she has been secretly wealthy all along, but instead the poor person who rises to wealth by any means necessary, drug trafficking included.[1] In contrast to these mass media representations, in two recent performances and one exhibit in Mexico City, artists engage the issues of drug violence, state violence, and gendered violence in ways that might inspire further dialogue, action, and community, and they do this by devising varied strategies for inviting the audience in to participate in a consideration of these issues.

Displaced Women Organize

“Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción” is an interactive performance that employs drama, documentary, collage, art-making to consider the effort by the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas to create not only new homes, but new societies. The play asks: under what circumstances would building a house, or, together with your peers, building a neighborhood, attract the ire, hostility, and violence of others? When and why is the act of creating a “home” for oneself an affront to others? When we say we want to do good, for whom is that good? “Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción” is a “fábula documental” or fictional documentary drama created by the company LAB/Teatro Línea de Sombra in Mexico City, and recently performed at Teatro Benito Juárez in that city, tells the story of the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (The League of Women Displaced) in Colombia, and the neighborhood they constructed with their own hands to give life to themselves and their families. The title of the play might be translated to English as “Small Regions in Reconstruction,” and what the work addresses is the act of reconstructing the world one small neighborhood at a time by telling the story of a group of women – the Liga — displaced from their original homes by the combined violence of the Colombian conflict and drug trafficking, yet not resigned to marginality or the acceptance of violence.

Instead, the women joined together in the space where they found themselves, and organized to support each other, naming themselves the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas, and eventually erecting an entire neighborhood of 98 homes with cement blocks they learned to construct themselves. Their neighborhood abuts a new housing development in the area that is a kind of suburban enclave, and yet the women’s neighborhood offers a version of “improvement” and defines “good” in ways that contrast with those advertised and offered by the model of suburban living. As we learn in this performance, this difference creates tension but also inspires other women and working people to initiate their own construction efforts.

Interactive and Collective Work in Performance

Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción tells a collective story in a collective way, re-enacting the physicality of making and placing concrete blocks to construct a home; shifting among varied voices; working to make the collective of women present visually on stage while also acknowledging the important role of human rights lawyer and activist Patricia Guerrero in advising the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas. Many of the women in the Liga and the “City of Women” are Afro-Colombian, and on their webpage they describe themselves as a multiracial and multiethnic community, though the performance does not explicitly address the questions of race and ethnicity as these intersect with gender in the experience of the displaced women. The violence that the women flee from and then encounter again when they have the audacity to build their own homes is juxtaposed in this performance with the violence of the drug wars and a luxurious home and zoo built by Pablo Escobar.

Creating block houses. Performance of Pequeños Territorios en Recconstrucciòn by Teatro Linea de Sombra. January 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The playwrights, actors, and director first heard about La Liga in 2010 from an article in El Proceso about heroic women that included the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and women fighting against feminicide in Juárez, Mexico. They traveled to Colombia from Mexico to meet the women of the Liga, and visited them twice more in the following years to learn about the neighborhood they were constructing and to participate in arts workshops in the newly founded “City of Women.” Out of those repeated visits, a relationship developed, one that felt to the creators of Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción as something they could learn from, living as they do, too, in a country beset by violence. Yet the performance resists easy comparisons between Colombia and Mexico, and this collaboratively produced and enacted interactive performance asks audiences to attend to the specific contexts of each place. Auad Atala, Alicia Laguna, Eduardo Bernal, Jorge A. Vargas, and Noé Morales collaborate to tell the story of the “City of Women,” and the threats of violence and attacks that the women experienced for their initiative. They are joined in this performance, as they are in each run of the work, by two children from the “City of Women,” who also participate in telling the story of their home, of their mothers, of their neighbors, and of their peers – with great pride and delight! The story unfolds in various modes: the actors and children speaking as they construct models of the “City of Women” on stage intermixed with documentary footage as well as real and imagined text projected on a large screen at the back of the stage. As the story unfolds, the model-sized “City of Women” is slowly constructed on stage by the actors and children, and then populated with images of the actual women who built this neighborhood, concrete block by concrete block, with their own hands. The performance ends with an invitation to the audience to visit the “City of Women” that has been reconstructed on the stage, view the pictures and layout firsthand and discuss the project with the actors and children. The audience responded with much warmth and interest to this last section of the performance, engaging in dialogue both with the creators of this performance and with other audience members.

Remembering and Enacting Feminist Action

The “City of Women” in Turbaco, Colombia, is not new; it came into being fifteen years ago, and yet this performance conveys the significance of feminist action that it represents and positions the audience to consider its relevance in contemporary contexts. In this way, it both remembers and enacts, because the conditions that gave rise to the Liga and City are conditions that women face across the Américas. This interactive performance takes a distinctly different approach to the history of feminist action against violence in the Américas than that recently taken by the Argentine government in two important actions. In January of 2016, La Jornada reported that the Argentine Minister of Health stripped the name of one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plazo de Mayo, Laura Bonaparte, from the title of public hospital. Bonaparte’s name had been added to the hospital’s name upon her death in 2013 and in homage to her work on behalf of the disappeared and tortured. In addition, María Coronel, and other employees of the Escuelita de Famaillá in Tucumán — which was the first clandestine center of detention run by the last dictatorship, and which had been transformed into a memorial space dedicated to human rights issues – were dismissed. Coronel is quoted in La Jornada saying [my translation]: “Memorial sites are not just official jobs; they are the result of years of struggle and we will continue to maintain them no matter what, they are not going to disappear us.”[2]

Intimacy and Violence

Another contemporary performance that employs and combines the techniques of documentary and those of drama is Hugo Salcedo’s Música de Balas. Salcedo’s work won the 2011 National Prize in Dramaturgy and was reprised recently by four talented young actors – three men and one woman — at Casazul in Mexico City. The cast includes Christel Klitbo, Christhian Alvarado, Quetzalli Cortés, and Raúl Rodríguez. Música de Balas, or The Music of Bullets, took place in a small black box theater, the Sala Experimental Ludwik Margules, an intimate setting, with audience members sitting on three sides of performance space. The actors make use of the small performance space to great effect, and sometimes move among the audience, and include them as “extras” in some dramatic scenes. A series of first person accounts about the experience of narco violence in Mexico fold, and through these narratives we begin to take stock of the trauma induced by this violence and the danger of it becoming an everyday state of being. These dramatic accounts are sometimes supplemented by and sometimes alternated with documentary footage or photographs of violent events and acts in the country over the past decade. In Música de Balas the victims of violence lament their loss, manifest their trauma, critique government action and inaction, question the perpetrators of violence and those of us who witness it as it ultimately conveys how we are all victims.

El Tendedero by Mónica Meyer. March 2016 at MUAC. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The retrospective exhibit of Mexican feminist artist Monica Mayer’s work, Si tiene dudas…pregunte, or “If you have questions…ask” — now on display at the MUAC or Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, and running until July 31, 2016 — also explores the intimacy of violence in several projects, including an interactive piece titled El Tendedero or “The Clothesline,” an updated version of a 1978 installation pictured in the exhibit that questioned women about their experience of Mexico City. El Tendedero questions viewers about the experience of sexual harassment and violence. The piece asks a series of questions about when and where viewers experienced sexual harassment or violence, how they acted in response, how this changed their behavior, and what they’ve done to prevent such violence in the future. The questions and answers, written on pink cards, are attached with clothespins to wire lines, forming a wall of hanging pink cards, all seemingly the same and yet unique and distinct voices. The title of the piece explicitly challenges the sexist discourses that cast sexual violence and harassment as “private” and “intimate” dirty laundry that should not be aired (often to protect the “reputation” of perpetrators), discourses that remain prevalent throughout the world. A panel discussion linked to the exhibit, “Vocabularios contra el acoso,” offers a valuable discussion of the human rights of women in local and global contexts that begins from a consideration of this particular art project.

Closeup of El Tendedero by Mónica Mayer. MUAC. March 2016. Photo by T Delgadillo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In these distinct and innovative ways, Mexican artists are engaging the fictional and the documentary to invite audiences to join them in exploring a series of questions relevant not only in Latin America but throughout the Americas. Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción aims to have as much of an impact on theater audiences as the women of the Liga had on those around them by critically representing the ways that their collective creative and progressive energies destabilized acceptance of violence. Música de Balas represents the terror experienced by ordinary men and women subjected to extreme forms of violence as well as uncertainty in ways that combats de-sensitization and reminds audiences of the enduring impacts of trauma. El Tendedero allows us to hear the voices of women combatting sexual harassment and abuse as it opens a path for audiences to enact their own resistance to this violence.

[1] Sergio Ramírez. “La superproducción más cara de la historia.” La Jornada. 20 enero 2016.

[2] Stella Calloni. “Retiran nombre de fundadora de Madres de Plaza de Mayo a un hospital en Argentina.” La Jornada. 20 enero 2016.

Theresa Delgadillo is a member of the Editorial Group for the Mujeres Talk website. She is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University and the author of Latina Lives in Milwaukee (Illinois, 2015) and Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (Duke, 2011).

The Story of Justice For My Sister: Combatting Gender-Based Violence Across Borders

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By Kimberly Bautista

People standing behind altar for Day fo the Dead

Justice for My Sister Collective members adorn Altar for Día de los Muertos at Grand Park in LosAngeles, curated by Self Help Graphics & Art www.selfhelpgraphics.com
Photoed (L to R) Paulina Castro Murillo, Kimberly Bautista, Daniella Padilla-Ortiz. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

My Testimonio of Coming Full Circle

Coming full circle is when your activism leads to your scholarly work, and that leads to your community work and career. And you continue cycling through this rotation in different ways during your journey. For me, at the center for each of these intersecting worlds and coming full circle is healing through community–recognizing myself and my own struggles in the testimonios of my sisters, brothers, and all my relations who connect and build together to produce critical work and uplift our struggles to heal our mundo. The connections among us are numerous. Recently, I’ve considered a few examples of this “full circle” in my experience. One is when my friend from UC Santa Cruz Edith Gurrola invited me to speak about my documentary Justice for My Sister and its violence prevention campaign at Comisión Femenil in the San Fernando Valley. After the talk, I spoke with Rosemary Muñiz, College Admissions Adviser at CSUN, and realized that we had met at the Comisión back in 2007 when they hosted my student group Speak Out For Them (SOFT) at their event to denounce the unsolved cases of las muertas de Juárez. Another was hearing

Lourdes Portillo, the filmmaker who created Señorita Extraviada, in an academic context and getting inspired to co-found the club Speak Out For Them (SOFT) with my friend Joanna Kibler. Yet another example of “full circle” in my life was running into my mentor Maria Soldatenko at a march in Guatemala. Many years before that Soldatenko had introduced me to Lucia Muñoz from MIA, Mujeres Iniciando en Las Americas, who holds trainings for Men Against Feminicide in Guatemala. One final example is when MIA advocate Marina Woods introduced me to JFMS Collective members in Guatemala in 2011 and later joined our retreat in Los Angeles to train us on Gender 101 in 2012. Full circle. Every time.

Children and Adults holding purple balloons

Comunidad en Boyle Heights (Los Angeles) commemorate those affected by violence and symbolically release trauma through a balloon release at Retomemos la Noche. Photo by Sonia Hernandez IG: @_bag_lady_ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

These “full circle” moments are about the importance of creating community. With my film, I commit to continuing that work by screening the film annually with our SiStars from Mujeres de Maiz at the Boyle Heights Farmers Market and hosting a series of Healthy Relationships Panels with the Justice for My Sister Collective and our partners in Los Angeles. These events gave us advocates and activists a chance to have meaningful conversations about our own relationship histories. These talks led to other conversations about community accountability. Community accountability, through transformative justice can lead to healing, and more creative and love-centered approaches to breaking cycles of violence. It provides an alternative to the prison industrial complex, which has historically criminalized men, women, and gender non-conforming individuals of color and torn our communities apart.

Personal Stakes Led to a Bigger Movement

Let me take a step back to explain why healing through community is so important to my journey. Justice for My Sister is my award-winning documentary about violence against women in Guatemala. It follows the story of Rebeca during her journey to hold her sister’s killer accountable in spite of victim-blaming and impunity.

When I was in the field during production, I was targeted in a home invasion where my equipment was stolen and I was raped at gunpoint. The ringleader of the operation threatened to kill me. I realized then that the film had to be much more than an advocacy piece. It needed to be part of a larger solution to actively prevent gender-based violence through leadership development where participants (both women and men) are trained to become resources to their peers. It’s for this reason that our educational materials are tailored to a variety of audiences: mothers of young children, youth (young women and men), police, judges, lawyers, religious communities, Indigenous communities, survivors of violence, and men who work in male-dominated industries.

At the core, this documentary and the curriculum created inspires entire communities to empower themselves by understanding how to identify the different forms of violence, as well as how to offer solutions. As part of the film screening, we develop local resource guides (many audiences otherwise don’t know where to go for help) and we emphasize the importance of healthy relationships. We emphasize that “healthy relationships” within community extends past intimate partner situations: it encompasses relationships in family, friendships, work, and lucha. It means we listen attentively, ask questions, speak from the heart, give space to others, and stand our ground (read: set and maintain boundaries). Self-care is also fundamental to achieve healthy relationships in community. We must sometimes retreat, sleep, replenish, and reflect in order to be fully present for others and continue in our (beautiful) struggle for equitable exchanges in our everyday interactions and in our overarching narrative in our fight for a more equitable society, free of victim-blaming, where we can individually and collectively reach our full potential.

Accountable Representation and Filmmaking

In the making of the documentary, I was concerned with creating an ethical representation of Rebeca and her family, whose story we follow. It was very important for me to develop a good relationship with them in a humble way, keeping in mind that I was entering a very sensitive moment in their lives where they were recently exposed to live-changing trauma. The unity that we developed with each other surface in the film, and this is why the story resonates with audiences. Rebeca became a support for me when I was subject to abuse, and she helped me frame the narrative in my mind so that I could see myself as an empowered individual. She helped me keep my vision in mind during my healing process, which continues to this day. That has been an enormous source of strength.

Also, Rebeca is very relatable: many people understand the nature of fighting for someone you love and the struggle for justice in the face of all the odds. Rebeca’s heroic determination is very empowering and the truth is, many people are hungry for these stories to be on screen, because sadly Rebeca’s fight is one of many–we just simply don’t see it often on the screen because the mainstream media places more value on the lives of the affluent.

Shero Rebeca Eunice Perez (donning a shirt from our Collective in Los Angeles) meets
representatives from UN Women in Guatemala after an inspiring talk at a university
in Guatemala City. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It was important for me to follow Rebeca in particular because she’s a single mother of five from Escuintla, a community rarely represented in popular media. She’s a woman who descends from Indigenous folks, who identifies as costeña, who obtained a sixth grade education. She makes tortillas for a living, and essentially became an advocate and investigator for her sister’s case. She was determined to hold her sister’s killer accountable, an almost unimaginable task in a country where 99% of men who kill women are never punished, and often times, not even investigated. Rebeca’s determination and courage in the face of threats and intimidation on behalf of the suspect, and discrimination and objectification on behalf of the state, is inspiring. Audiences who have had the privilege to meet Rebeca at a screening approach her as a role model, and can’t help but hug her.

Breaking Silences and Building Justice

The feature-length documentary has been on tour in Guatemala with advocates from the Justice for My Sister Collective since we had a rough cut in late 2011. Every time we screen it, audiences come forward to break the silence and share their own stories. In 2013, I decided I wanted to document some of the other stories to highlight the far-reaching impact of gender-based violence and bring more visibility to other cases as well. Many of the stories in our web series are of survivors that had seen Rebeca’s story in the feature documentary and decided they also wanted to share their stories. Again, coming full circle. We want to offer survivors a platform to share their stories, casting aside blame and shame (as the historically typical narrative would have it), and in turn break the silence and disrupting the hegemonic, heteronormative, white supremacist, imperialist, victim-blaming narrative.

We should all feel passionately about eradicating gender-based violence, because gender-based violence affects many communities in distinct ways. And if you’re doing nothing, here’s your gentle cue to get centered so you can work on empathy a bit more. I know mainstream occidental culture has worked hard to program empathy out of us, but we just have to focus on our humanity a few moments a day to reclaim it.

In Ecuador there’s a chant: “Si tocan a una, nos tocan a todas.” “If they touch one woman, they touch us all.” This is true anywhere that men get away with these crimes; impunity gives aggressors a sense of entitlement or a license to abuse or even kill in some cases. Sometimes it feels daunting because there’s a lot of work to be done. That’s when seeing the human impact of the campaign is most heartening. Through the production of Justice for My Sister, the film’s campaign materials, and the support of Community Partners, we have provided a platform for women to lift up their voices and be heard, which is very healing when you’ve been silenced and your story has been challenged or questioned. The feedback we’ve received from survivors of abuse, their children and their families assures us that we’re on the right path.

Kimberly Bautista is a Colombian-Irish-American feminist, filmmaker, and community organizer based in Southern California. Her feature-length documentary film, Justice for My Sister, has screened in over 20 countries as part of a transnational campaign to prevent gender-based violence. The film has won several accolades, including the HBO-NALIP 2012 Documentary Filmmaker Award, and Best Documentary at film festivals in Holland, Bolivia, Guatemala, France, and Los Angeles. She has spoken as an expert on the topics of gender-based violence and representation of women and girls in the media at the United Nations Office at Geneva, and at the INternational PUblic Television Screening Conference (INPUT) in El Salvador. She acted as jury member for the Connect the Docs Transmedia Pitch Competition at the 2013 Hot Docs Conference & Forum in Toronto, Canada. She is the Project Lead for the Justice for My Sister Collective, a project of Community Partners that uses an arts-based approach to create safe spaces within marginalized communities to initiate collective healing and develop local leaders to combat gender-based violence.

To bring the film Justice for My Sister to your campus, organization, or film festival, email justiceformysister@gmail.com. To purchase a copy of the film and study/discussion guide, please see: http://newdayfilms.com/film/justice-my-sister Continue reading →

The Marlin Mine and Women’s Resistance

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Mountaintop gravel mining in Guatemala. Photo taken by Tim O’Brien. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Nancy Sabas

With the permission of the author, we are republishing a blog essay by Nancy Sabas on Indigenous Mam Mayan women resisting mining operations in their community of San Miguel Ixtahuacán in the highlands of Guatemala. The essay originally appeared on the Latin American Advocacy Blog in June 2015 and is republished here with additional reference notes for readers.

Was it you who sent the miners?
They violate the womb of Mother Earth
They take the gold, destroying the hills.
One gram of blood is worth more than a thousand kilos of gold.
What about my people?
And you, my God, where are you hiding?
Fear paralyzes us
My people are sold and they do not realize it.

-Portion of a song written by the Parish of San Miguel Ixtahuacán.

A few weeks ago, I organized a learning tour for North American participants to discuss the mining industry in Guatemala, On the tour, we visited the department of San Marcos and surrounding communities that deal with this problem.

Mining operations in Guatemala are not a recent issue. In 1998, two years after the signing of the peace agreement following a harsh civil war, the Foreign Investment Law removed the restrictions on trade with Guatemala, which attracted transnational companies to enter the country. Among the various companies, Goldcorp, a Canadian extractive company with high interest in exploiting gold, stands out.

After a license granted by the Guatemalan government, the Marlin mine, operated by Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of Goldcorp, began its operations in the community of San Miguel in western Guatemala. This was done without prior community consultation, even though it is an obligatory requirement of various international and national laws.¹ In 2009, Goldcorp stopped appearing in the Canadian Jantzi Social Index for ethical investment due to the controversial use of cyanide in their operations.² Currently the Marlin mine is considered the most lucrative mine that Goldcorp owns worldwide.

During our trip, we visited the community and interviewed community members to hear their side of the story. I met Crisanta Pérez, a Mayan Mam woman with 6 children who lives with determination, loyal to her philosophy of caring for Mother Earth and defending her territory. Crisanta resists and denounces Goldcorp’s environmental and community violations. Despite facing intimidation, 14 arrest warrants and criminalization for her work in defense of her territory and human rights, Crisanta stands firm. When we asked her how the resistance movement in San Miguel was born, she explained, ”There are many men who work as miners in the company. Our community is divided in opinions, and although some of the men disagree with the mining operations in the community, they do not take a position because they are working there. It is for this reason that the resistance movement in San Miguel against mining started from the women.¨

As an indigenous woman, Crisanta faces various levels of oppression. However, she resists the roles imposed by a patriarchal hegemonic system, and has become a public figure, with a voice, empowered with knowledge about her rights and equipped to assertively demand the vindication of environmentally sustainable traditional practices, in line with the Mayan worldview. In addition, Crisanta tirelessly denounces the massive exploitation of resources.
¨Transnational companies are destroying the most valuable thing we have, Mother Earth,¨ Crisanta explained during our visit.

With her focus from the periphery, Crisanta defies the ruling capitalist logic that sacrifices the sacred elements (Mother Earth) and whose goal is the strict accumulation of wealth. The position of inequality that Crisanta has, along with other Mam women, enables her to integrate a more holistic perspective in line with her worldview and allows her to critique the mining operations from a Maya Mam light. These women, based on their condition of oppression, have the ability to see with clarity from the base. This viewpoint enables them to understand the world from their ancestral worldview, as well as the reality of the mestizo (the Guatemalan State), and the dominant white (Goldcorp). This understanding contrasts the power groups’ viewpoint who understand and legitimize their knowledge as the only valid form of knowing. The women have become privileged epistemic subjects, for not being ¨contaminated¨ with only one way of knowledge that comes from an advantageous social position.

A member of the Catholic parish, an indigenous Mam woman facing towards the Marlin mine. Photo credit: Matthew Kok. Used with permission of author.

The case of mining in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, its environmental impact and the criminalization of women activists, can be understood from an ecofeminist perspective. As Vandana Shiva, in her book Stolen Harvest states: ¨For more than two centuries, patriarchal, eurocentric, and anthropocentric scientific discourse has treated women, other cultures, and other species as objects. Experts have been treated as the only legitimate knowers. For more than two decades, feminist movements, Third World and indigenous people’s movements, and ecological and animal-rights movements have questioned this objectification and denial of subjecthood.¨ The Guatemalan state and the mining company, driven by their focus on production, consumption and accumulation of wealth fail to respect the sovereignty and spirituality of indigenous peoples. The Mayan worldview is trampled by a mercantilist system that does not recognize the land as sacred, positioning man/production over woman /nature.

Crisanta and the anti-mining resistance group of San Miguel are reluctant to embrace the imposition of a clearly western and patriarchal “development” that despises life in the periphery and legitimizes abuse from its position of power. On the contrary, the women demand ¨the good life,¨ which according to their worldview and ancestral knowledge, consists in the search for harmony and balance with Mother Earth and all forms of existence. This philosophy of living naturally disapproves all forms of accumulation and exploitation that would alter the harmonious coexistence and quality of life of other beings.

In 2008, the Pastoral Commission of Peace and Ecology (COPAE) of San Marcos along with other organizations doing independent studies presented their detections of arsenic, aluminum, copper, manganese, and other metals in some water sources near the Marlin mine. The poor management of the mine waste and their presence in natural sources of water is a good explanation for the increase in gastrointestinal and skin diseases among the neighbors of the nearby communities.

During my visit, as we were interviewing members of the Parish of the San Miguel community, we talked about how racism was politically used to justify these atrocities. A parishioner tearfully explained, abuse is legitimized under the premise that ¨the Indians are dirty and unhygienic.¨ The hierarchy of race or gender is illogical and cannot be interpreted if it does not fall within a base structure with political interest. This is a clear example, where the discrediting and discrimination of a population is aligned with neoliberalist interest.

¨On the threshold of the third millennium, liberation strategies must ensure that human freedom is not achieved at the expense of other species, that freedom of one race or gender is not based on the increasing subjugation of other races and genders. In each of these struggles for freedom, the challenge is to include the other.¨ –Vandana Shiva

For me, Crisanta´s resistance is a miracle born from an oppressed community. The same system that abused and excluded Mam women, now is the same that caused the conditions for them to become creators of new knowledge outside of a dominant perspective. The heart and unbreakable spirit of these women defending their territory and returning to their ancestral knowledge, translates their struggles against the violation of the land to their female bodies and vice versa. They are women who cling to their indigenous philosophy of the ¨Good Life,¨ seeking harmony and sustainable living between people and nature peacefully. Under that view, Crisanta and the women of San Miguel Ixtahuacán rethink, deconstruct and reconstruct themselves.

Take action:
Send a letter to your congressmen to ensure that ensure that Canadian oil, mining and gas companies live up to international human rights, labour and environmental standards:
http://www.kairoscanada.org/take-action/open-for-justice/

References:

1. S. James Anaya, “Preliminary Note on the Application of the Principle of Consultation with Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala and the Case of the Marlin Mine, ” UN Human Rights Council Report A/HRC/15/37/App. 8 (July 8, 2010), http://unsr.jamesanaya.org/special-reports/preliminary-note-on-the-application-of-the-principle-of-consultation-with-indigenous-peoples-in-guatemala-and-the-case-of-the-marlin-mine-2010

2. Jantzi Research Client Alert (2008), https://goldcorpoutofguatemala.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/jantziresearch-alert-080430-goldcorp-final.pdf

3. Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, (Boston: South End Press, 2000).

Nancy Sabas, originally from Honduras, currently lives in Guatemala as a exchange coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee. She has a degree in Business Management and is a current student in a feminist studies certification course provided by Ixchel women´s collective in Guatemala City.

Central American Migrant Minors: Sentimental Stories or People with Human Rights?

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Girls at Tenosique Migrant Shelter. Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa. CC BY-NC-ND.

By Ana Elena Puga

What do we make of a photo of a two-year-old Honduran baby with a bandaged leg stump, the consequence of an accident on the freight train that he and his migrant mother were riding? Or the news stories about the 12-year-old Ecuadorean girl who hung herself in the shower after her attempt to reunite with her family was foiled by the arrest of her guide?

These past few months anyone in the United States who follows the news has seen a torrent of stories and images detailing the suffering of Latin American migrant minors who are brought here by their parents, or who come on their own in an attempt to work, reunite with family, or seek political asylum. As an academic who spent the last year conducting research in Mexican shelters and other facilities that help migrants, I am struck by how few people in the United States make the connection between their own comforts and the pain of others.

Every time I see a Fruit of the Loom ad, for instance, I think of the young woman I spoke to with blisters on her feet from walking for days from the Mexico-Guatemalan border to reach a shelter in Arriaga, Chiapas. In El Salvador she had left her village for a larger city to work in a Fruit of the Loom factory, sewing together my brand of underwear. She earned just enough money to stay alive and keep working, but not enough to feed, clothe, and educate her children. Having uprooted herself once for the sake of work made it easier for her to uproot herself again in hopes of an even better wage in the United States proper – instead of its exploitative outpost abroad. That six-pack of women’s underwear I can buy at Walmart for under $10 depends on the labor of people who are already working for us, even before they physically arrive on U.S. soil.

Family at Train in Celaya, Guanajuato. Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa. CC BY-NC-ND

Emotional reactions to this year’s rise in the number of undocumented children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border often take one of two forms: sentimental-but-useless compassion or angry rejection. My dentist’s receptionist, like many well-intentioned people, lamented, “It just tears my heart up. I wish I could adopt them all.” Gut-twisting images and horror stories sometimes lead us to drown out the migrant experience in our own tears.

At the other extreme, The New York Times reported that protesters in Murrieta, California, shouted “Go home!” at migrant mothers and children on buses. Protesters opposed to a proposed shelter in Vassar, Michigan, presumably felt so threatened by the migrants that some of them reportedly carried semiautomatic rifles and handguns.

Even President Barack Obama adopted a stern tone: “Do not send your children to the border. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.” It’s difficult to imagine Central American parents hearing this on the news and saying, “OK, since you asked so nicely, I’ll just accept that it’s my lot in life to stay here with my kids, no matter how bad the poverty or the violence gets.” And what about the many minors who don’t ask permission before they hit the road? When we blame the parents, we ignore that most Central American mothers and fathers are doing the best they can to cope with global economic forces and structural violence that leave them on the short end of the neoliberal stick.

Central America is not an isolated, distant region of the world where the United States and its citizens bear little responsibility. Many books have been written on the long, nasty history of U.S. intervention in the region. To recall just a few highlights: in 1954 the CIA sponsored a coup in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company that destroyed a democratically elected government and plunged the country into decades of genocidal military rule; in the 1980s, the United States funded the Salvadoran military during that country’s civil war, despite the military’s links to right-wing death squads in the service of a tiny upper-class elite; in the wake of the 2009 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya from Honduras, the United States provided funding for the police force of Zelaya’s successor, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, despite his ties to the coup leaders and his shaky human rights record.

Not to mention that our consumer demand for illegal drugs fuels violent organized crime networks throughout the hemisphere, some of which also specialize in the human trafficking of Central American minors.

Children Playing at Tenosique Migrant Shelter. Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa. CC BY-NC-ND

The United States can pressure Mexico to attempt to seal its southern border with Guatemala, but as Father Alejandro Solalinde, the director of a shelter for migrants in Ixtepec, Oaxaca reminded me, “People will migrate when they have to regardless of what governments try to decide for them, whether they pass immigration reform or build more walls.”

What if we were to think of undocumented migrant children neither as the heart-string tugging heroes of (let’s face it) entertaining melodramas featuring poor innocent, vulnerable children on dangerous adventures nor as the germ-ridden children of villainous criminals invading our country (depending on your point of view). What if we expend more of our energy on figuring out how to respect their rights? The Obama administration’s recent decision to interview some Honduran minors in their home country to determine whether they qualify for refugee status will not provide a perfect solution, since few children are likely to meet the stringent qualifications for a very limited number of visas. But at least it conceives of children less as objects of our own love or hate and more as persons with human rights under international law, persons for whom we bear an undeniable responsibility.

Ana Elena Puga is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Theatre and Spanish & Portuguese at The Ohio State University. She is working on a book, Staging Migrant Suffering: Melodrama in Latin American and Latino Activism, with sociologist Víctor M. Espinosa. Their 2013-14 research in Mexico was supported by a Fulbright fellowship.

From Pig Food to Haute Cuisine

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March 25, 2013

By Catherine S. Ramírez

Many years ago, a family I knew—let’s call them the Pedrazos—invited their parish priest to their home for dinner. Like many Mexican Americans, the Pedrazos were Catholic. Their priest was from Spain. In all likelihood, he’d been assigned to their church to attend to its many Spanish-speaking parishioners. The Pedrazos made tamales for him, a sign that they held their guest in high esteem, as tamales require a fair amount of work and Mexican Americans generally serve them on special occasions. As I picture them readying themselves and their home for their visitor, I imagine Mrs. Pedrazo spreading the creamy masa and spicy meat filling over the wet cornhusks and carefully folding the ends of each hoja to create a tidy bundle. I picture scores of tidy bundles. Then I imagine the astonishment, disappointment, injury, and anger she and her husband felt when their guest refused to eat the meal she had prepared for him. “No como comida de therdos,” the priest announced in his Castilian accent. Since the tamales were made of corn and pigs eat corn, he wouldn’t touch them.

Fig. 1

Today, it appears Spaniards’ attitude toward Mexican food has changed. In 2009, the New York Times’ Andrew Ferren surveyed a handful of Mexican restaurants in Madrid and concluded that Spaniards had “come a long way in embracing the food of their former colonies.”[1] The 2013 Páginas Amarillas, Madrid’s equivalent of the Yellow Pages, lists 103 Mexican restaurants. 11870, an online restaurant reservation service that functions somewhat like Open Table, tallies 104.[2] The Spanish capital also boasts 85 Argentine, 38 Peruvian, 27 Cuban, 23 Colombian, 21 Ecuadoran, ten Venezuelan, four Uruguayan, and three Chilean restaurants, not to mention 20 restaurantes sudamericanos.[3] Stores specializing in productos latinos, like Paraguayan yerba mate and mixes for arepas, savory Colombian cornmeal patties, dot the city. [Fig. 1]

Chirimoyas, a sweet, succulent fruit native to the Andes, can be found in just about any frutería. And many supermarkets have a small section devoted to Mexican food, complete with flour tortillas, ready-made guacamole and salsa, and kit fajitas. [Fig. 2]

Fig. 2

Without a doubt, the fruits of empire are available in Madrid in huge part because of the movement of Latin Americans to the former metropolis. According to a report published in 2010 by Network Migration in Europe, a Berlin-based think tank devoted to the study of migration and integration, a total of 2,365,364 people of Latin American origin lived in Spain in 2009. Latin Americans comprised 37 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 24 percent ten years earlier. Most hail (in numerical order) from Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru.[4] Relatively few are from Mexico, but of all the cuisines from Spain’s former colonies, Mexican seems to be the most prevalent and popular. Why?

As the American daughter of a Mexican immigrant who won the Los Angeles Times Best Home Cook of the Year Award in 1992, my response to this question is a simple duh: Mexican food is prevalent and popular in Madrid and many other places simply because it’s tasty. This is a glib, not to mention biased, answer. There are many reasons for the increasingly global demand for Mexican fare. Like German, Italian, and Japanese cuisines in the United States (think hot dogs, pizza, and sushi), Mexican food has been assimilated, in the literal and sociological senses of that word. For evidence of its absorption by and emanation from the American mainstream, one need only look at the proliferation of the Denver-based chain, Chipotle, which lays claim to restaurants in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France.[5] Despite atrocities “The Great Satan” has committed and continues to commit at home and abroad, Americana, be it in the form of jazz, Disney, Starbucks, or Mission District-style burritos, retains its allure in many places. According to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, Mexican fare has even made it to outer space. Since 1985, NASA has catapulted its astronauts into space with tortillas, which have proven more durable and less dangerous to sensitive equipment than bread.[6] Tony restaurants like Chicago’s Topolobampo show that Mexican food has also drifted from its humble origins. In 2010, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declared “traditional Mexican cuisine,” along with “the gastronomic meal of the French” and “Mediterranean diet,” an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This was the first and only time food made UNESCO’s privileged list.[7]

When I moved to Madrid in August of 2012, I was intrigued by the Mexican restaurants here and took it upon myself to eat in as many as possible before my return to the US the following year. How is the Mexican gastronomic experience reinterpreted in its new surroundings, I wondered? More concretely, who owns, works in, and patronizes Mexican restaurants in Madrid? And what can the migration and assimilation of Mexican food tell us about the migration and assimilation of people, both in the US and elsewhere? Along with an empty stomach, a full wallet, and an increasingly crammed notepad, these are some of the questions with which I’ve set out as I’ve explored Mexican cookery in my adopted city.

Fig. 3

Like images of the Virgin Mary in tree trunks, Mexican eateries in the US tend to reflect migration patterns and shifting demographics. However, the ones in Madrid—and, here, I’d wager to say in just about any other European city—testify more to that city’s elite cosmopolitanism. In other words, Mexican restaurants in Europe signal the presence of American expats and/or well-heeled foodies. By and large, the Mexican restaurants in Madrid have a trendier or more upscale air than their Latin American counterparts, many (but certainly not all) of which appear to be run by and for hardworking and thrifty immigrants. For example, at Hatun Wasi, a Peruvian restaurant that recently opened in the working-class, immigrant neighborhood of Cuatro Caminos, the no-nonsense dining room consists of mismatched chairs, tables, and bar stools. The floor is clean, but scuffed. A simple blackboard in the window announces the restaurant’s hours and the prices of various specials. [Fig. 3]

Fig. 4

A two-course menú del día or lunch special costs a mere three euros (around four dollars). In contrast, Takeiros, a Mexican restaurant near my apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Ríos Rosas, offers a three-course menú del día for 11 euros (roughly 14 dollars). Dinner runs around 30 euros (40 dollars), a hefty price for many madrileños, immigrant and native-born alike, in this moment of economic crisis. Where Hatun Wasi is a modest, if not barebones, joint, many Mexican restaurants in Madrid are bedecked with colorful decorations that scream ¡MÉXICO! (or, as the Spaniards spell it, Méjico), such as papel picado, serapes, and lucha libre masks. At Takeiros, Mexican lotería cards cover the walls and metal tooling lampshades dangle from the ceiling. [Fig. 4] And except for the live mariachi music Thursday nights at La Herradura, one of Madrid’s more established Mexican eateries, salsa music dominates the playlists in the Mexican restaurants I’ve patronized here.

Fig. 5

All the meals in these restaurants begin with a small basket of totopos (what Spaniards mistakenly call nachos) and salsa. The chips always taste a bit like reconstituted cardboard, a travesty given the ubiquity of mouthwatering fried food in Spain, most notably, churros, patatas fritas, and calamares a la romana. And while the salsa, be it red or green, is usually flavorful, it’s never spicy enough for me. Still, despite their less-than-promising start, the Mexican meals I’ve had in Madrid have been surprisingly satisfying. I’ve enjoyed fresh green salads garnished with velvety avocados and tangy flores de jamaica. Staples, like quesadillas, burritos, and flautas, can be found on nearly all menus. However, unless I’m at a burrito or taco bar, I usually don’t bother with the more prosaic foods. Instead, I go for more complex dishes, like pollo en mole poblano, cochinita pibil, and albondigas con salsa de chipotle. [Fig. 5] Mexican beers, such as Corona and Pacífico, are widely available; Mexican sodas and aguas frescas, less so. Impressively, Takeiros’ wine list consists exclusively of wines from Baja California.

A couple of Mexicans opened Takeiros in 2011. They own three other eateries in Madrid, one of which, a take-away counter, also specializes in Mexican fare. While the customers at Takeiros appear to be mostly Spaniards, the workers I’ve encountered there have all been immigrants. Peruvian and Ecuadorian chefs have prepared my food to perfection and Argentinian and Mexican waiters have delivered it to me and put up with my many questions. The dishwasher, like the waitress I photographed in front of Hatun Wasi, is a young immigrant from Romania.

I’ll wrap up with a brief discussion of Romania, what I’ve come to see as the Mexico of Europe. Just as Mexico hitched its cart to the NAFTA horse in 1994, Romania, one of Europe’s poorest nations, joined the European Union in 2007. While NAFTA failed to provide for the free movement of workers across Mexico, the US, and Canada, EU membership has allowed Romanians to move and work within member states. Like many Mexican migrants in the US, many Romanians came to Spain, Europe’s leading country of immigration from 2000 to 2007, to work in the then booming construction, tourism, hospitality, and domestic-service industries.[8] In 2008, they surpassed Moroccans as the largest foreign group in this country.[9] Then Spain’s economic bubble burst and unemployment skyrocketed. The Spanish government responded by trying to restrict Romanian immigration, a reversal of its commitment to admit rumanosas fellow members of the twenty-seven-nation EU.[10] More recently, the prospect of Romanians and Bulgarians being able to work freely in the UK starting in 2014 has provoked protests in that country.[11] To deter “an influx of unwanted people,” the UK’s equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security, the Home Office, has considered launching an advertising campaign in Romania and Bulgaria stressing Britain’s less attractive qualities, like its notoriously bad weather.[12] Hardy, despised, feared, and here to stay, Romanians, not unlike Mexicans in the US, are the cockroach people of Europe.[13]

In physiology, assimilation refers to consumption and the body’s absorption of nutrients after digestion. Like the Spanish priest who rejected the Pedrazos’ homemade tamales, Europe refuses to take in Romanians or to absorb what many of them have to offer: their labor. Indeed, it sees them as a contaminant, as the recent scare over horsemeat fraudulently labeled as beef has made patent. When horsemeat was first discovered in frozen lasagna in British and French supermarkets earlier this year, Romania was immediately cast as the culprit. French and British news media reported that new traffic laws banning horse-drawn carts in that country had led to the mass slaughter of horses and the subsequent introduction of horsemeat into the food chain. Even though the horsemeat was ultimately traced to a factory in southern France, the perception of Romania as dirty, primitive and, therefore, thoroughly un-European endures.[14]

Fig. 6

A Spaniard in LA. Chicken mole, Romanian workers, and a Chicana scholar in Madrid. Lasagna in France and Britain. Clearly, people and food travel. Far too often, the latter goes down more easily than the former, as the sign in the final illustration I’ve included in this essay indicates [Fig. 6].[15] Whether or not people assimilate and are assimilated—incorporated, integrated, welcomed—depends on numerous factors, including access to citizenship and basic social services, particularly education and health care, possession of rights and protections as workers, and genuine tolerance and respect.

Catherine S. Ramírez, an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is spending her sabbatical year in Madrid, where she’s writing a book tentatively titled Assimilation: A Brief History.

[1] Andrew Ferren, “Mexican Hot Spots in Madrid,” New York Times, May 5, 2009, http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/mexican-hot-spots-in-madrid/ (accessed March 18, 2013).
[2] http://11870.com/k/restaurantes/es/es/madrid (accessed March 19, 2013).
[3] http://madrid.salir.com/restaurantes (accessed March 18, 2013).
[4] Trinidad L. Vicente, Latin American Immigration to Spain, http://migrationeducation.de/48.1.html?&rid=162&cHash=96b3134cdb899a06a8ca6e12f41eafac (accessed March 18, 2013).
[5] “Chipotle Opens Restaurant in London, First in EU,” Denver Business Journal, May 10, 2010, http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2010/05/10/daily4.html (accessed March 19, 2013).
[6] Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA:  How Mexican Food Conquered America (New York:  Scribner, 2012).
[7] http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011 (accessed March 18, 2013).
[8] Michael Fix, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Jeanne Batalova, Aaron Terrazas, Serena Yi-Ying Lin, and Michelle Mittelstadt, Migration and the Global Recession:  A Report Commissioned by the BBC World Service (Washington, DC:  Migration Policy Institute, 2009), 33-34.  Also see http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/mpi-bbcreport-sept09.pdf (accessed March 19, 2013).
[9] Ibid., 38.
[10] Raphael Minder, “Amid Unemployment, Spain Aims to Limit Romanian Influx,” New York Times, July 21, 2011, http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/world/europe/22madrid.html (accessed March 19, 2013).
[11] Stephen Castle, “Britain Braces for Higher Migration from Romania and Bulgaria,” New York Times, March 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/world/europe/britain-braces-for-higher-migration-from-romania-and-bulgaria.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed March 19, 2013).
[12] Sarah Lyall, “Welcome to Britain.  Our Weather Is Appalling,” New York Times, January 29, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/europe/welcome-to-britain-our-weather-is-appalling.html (accessed March 19, 2013).
[13] I take the term, “cockroach people,” from Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 1973 novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York:  Vintage, 1989).
[14] Andrew Higgins, “Recipe for a Divided Europe:  Add Horse, Then Stir,” New York Times, March 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/europe/recipe-for-divided-europe-add-horse-then-stir.html?pagewanted=all (accessed March 19, 2013).
[15] This image is from http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/74/r2048252209bz4.jpg/sr=1 (accessed March 19, 2013).All other photos here were taken by the author.