Mexico

Letter From An Expat With Another View of Mexico

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My Mexican-American friend moved to Mexico a few years ago while working on her husband’s papers to legalize him to work in the States…which is taking a lot of time.  This was her recent email:

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL, Vol. VII

Now, I know Why They Jump The Wall…I Wanna Jump The Wall
And  –  Yes  –  We  –  Are  –  Still  –  Here

I was just telling a friend, back in the States, how waking up here I will sometimes think to myself, as I take in my surroundings, “shit, I’m still here.”  You know those mornings, where as soon as you open your eyes, you say to yourself, “man, it sucks to be me.”  Well, yesterday was definitely one of those days.  And, unfortunately not just for myself, but also for quite a number of people in my husband’s family, namely my mom-in-law.

My husband’s brother called us about 10 a.m.  He was frantic.  Evidently, Josefina had just gotten a phone call stating that my husband had been kidnapped and they were demanding a ransom of $50,000 Pesos, or they were going to kill him!  They put some guy on the phone who told my mother-in-law he was her son.  She asked him, “son, where are you?”  This same fucking bastard responded, SOBBING, “Mother, I can’t tell you because I’m bound and they have my eyes covered.”  The so-called kidnapper got back on the phone, and she informed him that she didn’t have $50,000 Pesos.  The caller told her that if she didn’t pay the money they would murder her son.  She simply stated that would be on his conscience, and that she didn’t have that kind of money and there was nothing she could do.  He asked her again if she were going to pay the ransom.  She repeated her response to his demand.  He finally yelled at her that she was a fucking bitch and hung up!

In her hysteria she couldn’t recall our phone numbers.  She ended up calling her eldest son.  He spoke with his mother and calmed her down as best he could.

My husband is the youngest of three sons.  He has been back home here in Mexico for almost three years after an absence of almost 11.  When we first got here, in February 2006, the first thing his mother said was that she couldn’t believe her eyes that her baby was home.  She said that she never expected to see him again.  They speak or see one another on a daily basis.

My mother-in-law is 75-years-old, in failing health, and lives alone.  We live minutes from her house, but she had no idea that this was not true at that moment in time.  Put yourself in her place.  Can you even imagine getting such a phone call about a loved one, and all that you would feel, think, experience?  I can’t imagine.  I don’t even want to.

My husband spoke with the police and they say that it is a local and national epidemic: Secuestros Telefonicos.  Translation:  Telephone Kidnappings.  They usually originate in prisons in the neighboring state of Mexico, in and around Mexico City.  Our very own landlord’s mother just two weeks ago received a phone call from someone stating that they had kidnapped one of her sons.  All of her children are adults living on their own.  She deposited $15,000 Pesos in ransom money into a bank account that she was directed to, which of course was under a phony name.  Thankfully all of her children were eventually accounted for and found to be safe, and the kidnapping to be bogus.  We’re told that she and one of her daughters are showing signs of extreme mental trauma. Read More

Settling In Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Well, you never know what life will bring you.  I am now looking for an apartment in Oaxaca once again and since the house is rented out it looks like I’ll be here for awhile.

November 21 was Revolution Day which passed quietly with the Governor appearing in an upper window of the Palacio.  Rumor has it that there will be a large mega-march on November 25 to commemorate the rout of the teacher strike out of the city by the Riot Control Police in 2007. The city will be covered with police this time too that is for sure.

But on the whole I feel quite safe here.  Just have to use common sense as in any other big city.

Remembering Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

After living for a year in Oaxaca in 2006-7, I have returned here for a couple months before going on to Central and South America.  Now I…

Remember the Alcala, the ancient cobblestone pedestrian street: the way your feet tip on the edges of the stones…almost unbalancing you as you walk.

Remember eating chile relleno tortas while listening to the marimba band at Cafe Jardin in the Zocalo late at night: sometimes an older couple dancing alone…the two of them…giving in to the rhythm.

Remember church bells ringing at 6:30 in the morning: a town spiritual alarm.

Remember Noche de Luz (Night of Light):  fireworks, calendas, children playing, the National Band; crowds of young people wait to get into ear deafening clubs  till 4am and you don’t sleep.

Remember warm love of friends: Max the aging-before-his-time anarchist over mescal and his housemates Sandy…and her 80 year old husband Budd…the BBC filmmaker who jumped onto the Yeltsin tank and took the picture that went around the world…and my friend Sharon who I met on the plane when we first arrived in Oaxaca. Bardo and Mica and daughter Angelita recovering from foot surgery and her brother Pavel named after some revolutionary Russian.

Remember five peso ice cream: doble please…

Remember familiar Trique vendors in long red dresses with horizontal stipes: Jorge in the Zocalo until 10:30pm when he takes the hour long bus back to his home and family in Mitla.

Remember the familiar beggars: the tiny girl on Alcala plays an accomplished tiny accordian. But avoid the old women with two apartment houses.

Remember colorful angry graffiti on ancient stone walls: the only voice of a repressed people.

Remember the taste of an Amarillo tamale made by an old woman in the market washed down with grey foamy tajate: the Zapotec drink of the gods.

Remember drinking beer with Gerardo: sexy Zapotec hustler here after 10 years on the streets of LA and Las Vegas.

Remember sweet smiles from strangers on the street: hola amiga!   Hasta Luego!

Remember hot Mexican chocolate and a free pan dulce on the street at 7am: the little man running from one side of the cart to the other in a hurry to serve his morning customers.

Remember eating in comida corridas: an omelette swimming in red sauce…sweet cafe olla made sheepherder style.

Remember made-up over-dressed Chilangos from Mexico city: slumming it on Sundays in Oaxaca…holding themselves with stuffy privilege…they gawk at the indigenous dark ones and don’t buy much.

Remember friendly courtyard apartment owners:  checking up on me…in and out. The younger sister speaking English after 4 years as a nanny in LA while leaving her two children here with her ex husband…saving her money and building a new house in which she rents out the extra bedrooms.

Remember to visit Adelina (the maid in the apartment where I lived in 2006 who works 12 hours a day for practically nothing) and living in a one-room tin-roofed shack which barely holds a double bed for her and her bright daughter Fernanda: surprised to see  the six year old at the English Lending Library taking part in story time…seemed so much more grown up now…shiny hair curled and turned under…paying a pittance for her schooling…the little girl I never had.

Remember the long drive to Oaxaca from the Columbia Friendship Crossing near Laredo Texas with my son Greg’s best friend who stayed with me for a month: lingering for hours with friends in the cafes in the Zocalo.

Remember the chapulines (dried grasshoppers): if you eat them here the legend says you will return.

Remember the invitation from a Mexican friend to go to Hautla with him and eat magic mushrooms: you were chicken and never did.

Remember thoughts of moving here…

Oaxaca’s Radio Wars

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Oaxaca’s Radio Wars
By Charles Mostoller
Despite assassinations, community radio is spreading throughout southern Mexico. “Some people think that we are too young to be informed, but what they should know is that we are too young to die.”

These were the fateful words of Felicitas Martinez Sanchez and Teresa Bautista Merino, two indigenous Triqui radio broadcasters who were assassinated in southern Oaxaca on April 7th.

The two girls, aged 20 and 24, had worked for the recently inaugurated Radio Triqui, “The Voice that Breaks the Silence”, in the autonomous Triqui municipality of San Juan Copala. Read More

Speaking Of Hope

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Mexican journalist and author, Gustavo Esteva, in writing recently about the wrenching repression and resistance in Mexico and the world, draws an analogy:

    The Pot and the Vapor

In the midst of the daily struggle, an image attempting to express what has happened in Oaxaca is now circulating.

Years of fierce corruption and overflowing authoritarianism converted Oaxaca into a pressure cooker above a slow flame. [Governor]Ulises Ruiz added fuel to the fire until the pressure hurled the lid off on June 14th 2006, with the repression of a teachers sit-in. APPO [Popular Assembly] articulated the discontent brewing inside the pot and converted it into transformative action. The ferocity of the federal forces put a new heavy lid on top of Oaxaca on November 25th, but the fire continues. Small holes, that opened in the lid through people’s initiatives, alleviate the pressure, but they remain insufficient. The pressure continues to accumulate and in any moment will hurl the lid off once more. The experiences accumulated in the last year might provide ways to let the pressure escape in a more organized way, but nobody can foresee what will happen. There are too many forces at odds with each other.

Another metaphor can contribute to an understanding of what is coming. More than 35 years ago, in the final pages of La revolución interrumpida, Adolfo Gilly quoted some phrases from Leon Trotsky: “Without leading organizations, the masses’ energy will dissipate, like vapor not contained by a boiler. But be that as it may, what propels the movement is not the boiler nor the piston, but the vapor.”

What is this “real material, invisible and indefinable” that Trotsky calls “the masses’ energy” and compares with “vapor?” In contrast to this, adds Gilly, that material has “sense, understanding, and reason and because of this does not dissipate, like vapor, but endures transmuted in experience, invisible for those that believe that the movement resides in the piston and the boiler (in other words, in the organizational apparatuses), but existing in unexpected subsequent aspects of daily life.”

Oaxaca is still “at full steam”. Part of what was generated in 2006 has condensed itself into an experience and transformed into a behavior: it is in the daily attitudes of many people, who will never return to the old “normalcy.” Another portion of the “vapor” generated yesterday, or that comes up every day, propels many initiatives. And there is “vapor” that continues to accumulate, that raises the pressure and that perhaps is trying to redefine its course once it succeeds in liberating itself from everything still retaining it—which is not a boiler with a piston, but the oppressive lid of the repression that continues: political and police mechanisms blocking off the popular initiative.

The obsession to ascertain who generates that “vapor” persists, according to the prejudice that people can not take initiative themselves. It’s taken for granted that somebody, a person or a group, would be throwing rocks and hiding the hand: it would have manipulated the docile masses and would want to continue doing so. The media constructed their leaders, presenting as leaders people better adapted to the image they were creating to better prepare public opinion to the violent liquidation of the movement. The authorities did the same to organize co-optation and repression; they seem now to believe that the APPO will be paralyzed or at least disabled while those that supposedly lead the movement remain in prison. Similar attitudes have been observed in the left, inside and outside the movement. Those who think that what has happened would be inconceivable without a leading organization, now see it dissolved or weakened and want to renovate it or reconstruct it. Or else, when the absence of real leaders of the APPO is recognized, everything is transferred to the past: that deficiency would have provoked the evaporation of the spontaneous popular outbreak. The popular energy would have dissipated, like vapor not contained in a boiler.

When the question is not about seizing the State apparatuses, but about changing the social reality, the vapor, which continually condenses in experience, operates in its dissipation, spilling itself onto reality. Occasionally adapting itself in boilers and the pistons generated by the vapor itself and used for certain tasks, the vapor can not be contained in “organized apparatuses” nor be driven by “leading organizations”. For those apparatuses and organizations to be relevant and play a role, they should renounce the pyramidal structure, when a web is needed, and they must learn to lead by obeying. Furthermore, they should operate on an appropriate scale, adapting themselves continually to conditions and styles of the real men and women that are always the vapor, the impulse, and those finally determining course and reach of the whole movement.

Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real social processes. But the pot and the vapor are useful images to observe the complex present situation, in Oaxaca and greater Mexico, when what is most important seems to be invisible.

Then he has this to say about hope:

More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich observed that, “The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force.” [Deschooling Society, London: Marion Boyars, 1996, 105. (First published in 1972).]

In my view, there is nothing about the Zapatistas more important than their contribution to hope. Given the current situation in Oaxaca, Mexico and the world, we are still hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. In our context, hope is not the conviction that something will happen, but the conviction that something makes sense, whatever happens.

San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca Mexico January 2008

(Italics are mine. If the above reads a bit rough in places it is likely due to the best job that the translator from Spanish could do.)

UN Denounces Discrimination

Posted on by Laughingnomad

UN Denounces Racism in Mexico

Prensa Latina
Mexico, Dec 11

The Mexican chapter of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights revealed on Tuesday that indigenous women in the states of Guerrero, Chiapas and Oaxaca suffer sexual, work, educational and health discrimination.

A statement by UN representative Louis Arbour recommended the adoption of legislative, administrative, budgetary and judicial measures to overcome this situation.

Arbour explained that racism and sexism are great work loads for indigenous women, as well as is immigration of women to farm fields in northern Mexico and the United States and the abandonment of widows and minors.

Cases of sexual abuse or physical mistreatment by teachers, as well as discrimination in indigenous school shelters, have been reported among the child population, he noted.

The UN body added that regarding health, this population segment is also hit by malnutrition, mother and child mortality and an increasing presence of HIV AIDS.

The Sad End Of Mexican Criollo Corn?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

NAFTA and Biotech: Twin Horsemen of the Ag Apocalypse
The Last Days of Mexican Corn

By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.

The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new “elotes” (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even paused to pat the swelling ears with affection. Down the centuries most of the population of this megalopolis migrated here from the countryside at one time or another over the course of the past 500 years and inside every “Chilango” (Mexico City resident) lurks an inner campesino.

But the solitary stalk, sewn by an urban coalition of farmers and ecologists under the banner of “No Hay Pais Sin Maiz” (“There Is No Country Without Corn”) in planter boxes outside the downtown hotels, museums, government palaces and other historical monuments can just as easily be seen as a signifier for the fragile state of survival of Mexican corn.

As the year ripens into deep autumn, the corn harvest is pouring in all over Mexico. Out in Santa Cruz Tanaco in the Purepecha Indian Sierra of Michoacan state, the men mow their way down the rows much as their fathers and their fathers before did, snapping off the ears and tossing them into the “tshundi” basket on their backs.

In the evenings, the families will gather around the fire and shuck the “granos” from the cobs into buckets and carry them down to the store to trade for other necessities of life. It is the way in Tanaco in this season of plenitude just as it is in the tens of thousands of tiny farming communities all over Mexico where 29 per cent of the population still lives. But it is a way of life that is fading precipitously. Some say that these indeed may be the last days of Mexican corn.
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Mexico’s Unwanted Poor

Posted on by Laughingnomad

One migrant advocate that has recently been deported from the U.S. has said that “Mexico could not economically or socially absorb an estimated six million Mexicans who face deportation from the US.” She is probably right. More than a million undocumented Mexicans will be deported from the US this year, according to the Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior (IME). There are 5 million children living in the US with at least one undocumented parent, and more than 500,000 will be separated from their parents this year, the result of roundups at worksites and deportations, according to the National Council of the Raza.

Oaxaca, one of the two poorest states in Mexico, sends a huge percentage of it’s people North to work. Villages in the mountains I visited last year were virtually emptied of it’s men…and many women. There are no jobs. Education sucks. Children who only speak their native dialect are taught by inexperienced Spanish-speaking teachers in “schools” with dirt floors and no equipment or materials. I could go on and on. Wages from 4-5 months work in the U.S. can support an entire pueblo for a year. NAFTA has helped only a few northern towns and has penalized others. The price of corn, the staple food of Oaxaca, has skyrocketed.

However, absorbing illegal immigrants in the U.S. isn’t going well either…either for the U.S. or for the migrants. While living in Oaxaca last year I and other expats found ourselves on more than one occasion trying to talk Oaxacans out of migrating illegally. 400 migrants have died already this year trying to cross the border, according to Coalition in Defense of Migrants, and the total is likely to exceed 500 for the year due to increased border security. Working with migrants in the U.S. for 20 years has shown me the problems that result when Mexicans, cut off from their families, their language and culture, try to live an illegal life in the shadows. It’s not pretty. I could go on and on about that too.

Pressure is building on both sides of the issue. American views of both sides of this issue has been amplified in the media. This article describes the prevalent current view in Mexico:

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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Assigning Of Teachers In Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Here’s Jill Friedberg again with some insights on the teaching of indigenous children in Oaxaca:

“The demand for rezonification, one of the demands by the teachers during the strike in 2006, was not about where teachers are sent to teach. The rezonification was essentially a cost-of-living demand that would change the salary “zone” for Oaxaca, so that teachers salaries would catch up to the increasing cost of living. [Note: Teachers in Oaxaca City are also living in a city where foreigners have driven up the cost of living]

The assigning of teachers to teaching positions is very complicated in Oaxaca. The Section 22 of the teachers union has a say in who teaches where. And the section 22 has a certain amount of control over IEEPO (the state department of education). That said, not all decisions about who teaches where are decided by the Section 22.

It seems to me that it used to be that teachers were more likely to be assigned to communities where they spoke the same language as the community. But why that has changed may or may not have to do with a state attempt to reduce the ability of teachers and communities to build alliances, by sending teachers to communities where they don’t speak the language. I think it has more to do with the hardships of teaching in rural communities.
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Teacher Strike Complicated In Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

An email from Jill Friedberg…filmmaker and frequent visitor to Oaxaca…on some of the inner workings of the 2006 teacher strike until now:

When there are plantons (encampments), marches, etc. each delegation and sector within the Seccion 22 of the teacher’s union does something that looks a lot like role call (all teachers within that delegation or sector are on a list…those present get their names checked off the list, those not present do not). Over time, the amount of time that individual teachers spend at marches, plantons, etc. adds up in what the teachers refer to as “puntos,” (points) and the more puntos you have accumulated, the better your chances of getting the teaching job in the city that you want, or of getting promoted. A lot of teachers within the Seccion 22 are very critical of this puntos system, for multiple reasons:

1) it’s not fair, because a lot of teachers (especially single mothers) have legitimate reasons for not being able to attend marches and plantons
2) it’s a “lefty” version of the corruption that existed before the seccion 22 “democratized” the union
3) if people are down with the struggle, they shouldn’t have to be coerced into participating.

On the other hand, some teachers argue that it’s not a lot different than the kind of mechanisms that some US unions use, when they go out on strike, to make sure that members aren’t scabbing. If you are assigned to a picket line, you need to be there with the rest of the union members. Going out on strike isn’t about getting the day (or week, or month) off, it’s about participating in the strike / struggle. In other words, if the Seccion 22 goes out on strike and holds a planton, it’s not fair that some teachers are sleeping in the streets, while others are relaxing at home, when the gains of that strike go to everyone. That’s the argument in favor of the puntos (point) system.
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