Oaxaca

Oaxaca June 14, 2007

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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by Diana
June 16, 2007

It’s 4am in Oaxaca on June 14, 2007, which marks one year since the protesting teachers were violently evicted from the zócalo. And this year, no one is going to sleep through it. Firecrackers sound throughout the city, one louder than the next, a steady crescendo that lasts several hours. All over the city, the dogs howl.

Last year at this time exactly, a thousand police armed with dogs, clubs, rubber bullets and indiscriminate quantities of teargas invaded the teachers’ sit-in and violently evicted protestors as well as destroying the radio that represented them, Radio Plantón.

Teachers had camped out in the center of the city, demanding government investments to improve quality of public education in Mexico. The attack on the teachers union sparked one of the biggest, most inclusive social movements in Oaxaca’s history, which, in spite of continuous repression, has bravely mobilized over the last year demanding the resignation of state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and attention to collective discontent over lack of transparency, accountability and basic human rights.

La lucha sigue…

A year later, despite the arbitrary arrests, torture, and assassinations as well as divisionism, infiltration and attempts of political parties to co-opt the APPO, the popular movement commemorated their triumph in the face of last year’s repression in an impressive show of numbers.
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Birthday Fiesta

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Even though my birthday was last wednesday, I had preferred to stay in the zocalo to watch the June 14 commemoration. So last night I picked up friends Sharon and Max and we went to Mica and Bardo’s for cena (afternoon meal eaten at 4pm). Sharon brought a gift of a big jar of chopped garlic from Sam’s Club for Mica as the garlic cloves here are tiny and labor intensive to peel. Max brought a gallon of helado (ice cream.)

I had requested Mica’s shrimp sauteed in olive oil, chili, tomato salsa, garlic, oregano and the juice of oranges…cooled and eaten with fingers…heads and all. mmmm! We also had a juicy mixture of tuna, tomato, chili, garlic and I don’t know what all…wrapped in a flour tortilla and sauteed…also eaten with fingers. mmmm. We all ended up muy satisfecha (satisfied) and muy lleno (full). Mica had bought a chocolate cake soaked in rum with strawberries and my name written on top. We decided six candles were sufficient…I am 63 now. (Wow, how did that happen? Sounds old!) They didn’t even push my face in the cake…mordida…the price you pay for the fiesta…or cake…or your birthday? But they did sing a very long birthday song in Spanish. I felt like a very respected third-ager (last third of your life-span) and very celebrated.

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Just For Fun

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Meri and Mary Rain, volunteers at the Casa de los Amigos where Barbara and I stayed in Mexico City came to visit me this week. They were great fun and kept me company on my birthday as we sat in the zocalo to watch the march and commemoration activities of the June 14, 2006 police attack. Mary Rain, incidentally, is from Oregon and will begin a graduate program in urban planning & community development at Portland State in August. Meri will take a consulting position in San Francisco with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit providing leading-edge management strategies, tools and talent to help other nonprofits and foundations achieve greater social impact.

After siesta yesterday, we spent the evening with Mica and Bardo and a Zapotec weaver from Xachilla and one of his 10 young sons. Over mescal, beer, tacos and ranchero songs, and many laughs, Meri and Mary Rain inspired them with their fluent Spanish to expound on Uses & Custumbres, village life and Mexican politics. Bardo, baracho by this time, kept getting Meri and Mary Rain (who calls herself Lluvia…Spanish for rain) mixed up so Meri solved the problem this way:

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Anyway, Meri turned me on to this web site:

Guy named Matt dances a goofy dance all over the world.

From “About Matt” on his website:
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June 14 Symbolic Strike

Posted on by Laughingnomad

On June 14, this thursday, there will be a megamarch at 10:00 am (daylight savings time) from the crucero of the aeropuerto to the zocalo.

There will be a symbolic strike encampment in the zocalo, the teachers say 10% of their number, which mean 7000 people. There is no info on how long they plan to stay.

Barricades, installed from 17:30 to 21:00, will be installed in commemoration of last year’s blocking of several major streets.

The Popular Guelaguetza will take place on Cerro del Fortin on July 16.

Tourists!!!: Come for the Popular Guelaguetza, it’s free!

Below is an excerpt from the historic chronicle of the movement, translated by Nancy Davies from the book by Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez.

The teachers movement in 2006 and the 14th of June, 2006 (book text page 60)
by Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez

As in every year, in 2006 Section 22 on the first of May presented its annual document of demands, this time containing 17 general points and others relative to each specific education level and methods.
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Heading Off Another Year Of Unrest?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

This morning’s news…for the benefit of the English-speaking reader…
El Universal
Lunes 28 de mayo de 2007

High ranking judge calls for inquiry

Federal, state and municipal authorities committed grave violations against fundamental civil rights during the Oaxaca conflict that began in May 2006, Supreme Court Justice minister Juan Silva Meza said Sunday.

Silva Meza recommended that the Court create a committe to investigate the public officials responsible for the violations.

Among the high-ranking public officials who could be investigated are former President Vicente Fox, Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz and Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, who served as Secretary of Public Safety in 2006.
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An Old Friend Visits

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My friend Barbara and I hitch-hiked Europe the summer of 1965. Then I didn’t see her for thirty years. Then I found her on google about ten years ago…living 30 minutes from my house in Oregon. She has been here four days.

Today she, Mica, the kids and I drove to the Tlacalula market to pick up some hippy headbands for Charly to sell in Canada. Barbara had her first chivo (goat) barbecoa con consumme which she loved. The goat is cooked underground under hot rocks overnight.

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Walked by the colorful indigenous vendors from all over the mountains who come down on sundays for the market, bought some more alebrijes, surveyed the live pavo (turkeys) lying on the ground with feet tied together and picked up some fruit and flores (flowers.) It was hot so we dragged ourselves back to the car early in the afternoon to take off for Huayapam where we ate again…delicious caldo de res, (beef bone soup) that Bardo had waiting for us. A man that Bardo sells coffee to was there…owns a coffee finca (farm) in Pluma Hildalgo, south of here. Pluma Hildalgo is considered the primo coffee of Mexico. Bardo’s nephew was there too…from Teotitlan del Camino. Then a mescal vendor from Miahuatlan came by with plastic barrels of pechuga (chicken breast) mescal. We bought five liters to fill Bardo’s mescal barrel.
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Abastos Market

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Yesterday Sharon and I went shopping for furniture for her new digs when we came across this tired fruit vendor who had probably been up before sun-up. Sharon is moving from a third-floor bird’s-nest apartment to a ground-floor house in the centro..for less money.

URO Visits The Zocalo

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Last tuesday the teachers kicked off their usual June strike with a march to the Zocalo. It was pretty low key with teachers entering in small groups and with a few speeches and songs in the kiosk. APPO showed up about noon and promised they would be boycotting the government-sponsored Gueleguetza again this year…but that there would be a “Popular” Gueleguetza sponsored by the people as there was last year.

As I was about to leave the zocalo tuesday the governor showed up. The guy on the right is URO…guy on the left is the mayor of Oaxaca City. Didn’t notice the time but it was about dusk. Even though the zoc was pretty well thinned out he paraded more than once around the zocalo followed by video cameras and security… kissing babies, shaking hands and talking with a few people who came up to him. Interestingly, he never went near the west side. The place was crawling with security. Then for about 20 minutes or so he casually sat with the mayor and 3-4 others and had something to drink at a sidewalk table in front of one of the cafes (the one in front of the sushi restaurant) on the east side. Then he left with cameras in tow.

Pissing on his territory I guess.

“Oaxacans Like To Work Bent Over”

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This is the title of a paper issued this month by Seth Holmes with an M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in cultural and medical anthropology from UCSF and U.C. Berkeley. His paper, “‘Oaxacans Like to Work Bent Over’: The Naturalization of Social Suffering Among Berry Farm Workers,” captures the grinding details of what it takes to get strawberries out of the fields in Washington State, and in the equally challenging task of figuring out what it all means — and what to do about it.

Find this paper on Salon.com. In the posted review of the paper you will find a link to a PDF file that can be downloaded with Acrobat Reader.

Holmes says: “I began my fieldwork in a one-room shack in a migrant camp on the largest farm in the valley, the Tanaka Farm, during the summer and fall of 2003. I spent my days alternately picking berries with the rest of the adults from the camp, interviewing other farm employees and area residents, and observing interactions at the local migrant clinic.

In order to understand the transnational experience of migrant labor, I migrated for the next year with Triqui indigenous people from the Mexican state of Oaxaca whom I had come to know on the farm. I spent the winter living with nineteen of them in a three-bedroom slum apartment, pruning vineyards, and observing health professionals in the Central Valley of California. During the spring, I lived in the mountains of Oaxaca with the family of one of the men I knew from the Tanaka Farm, planting and harvesting corn and beans, observing the government health center, and interviewing family members of migrant workers back in the U.S.

Later, I accompanied a group of young Triqui men through the night as they hiked through the desert into Arizona and were caught by the Border Patrol. I then migrated north again from California, through Oregon where we picked up false social security cards, and once again to the farm in Washington State in the summer of 2004. Since then, I have returned to visit my Triqui companions in Washington, California, and Oaxaca on several shorter trips.”

Many of the conditions he describes on this Washington farm have been outlawed in Oregon by an omnibus bill I helped introduce, as a lobbyist, to the legislature in the 1990’s. This bill was pulled together by a coalition of farmers and farm labor advocates and one dedicated legislator who actually composed the bill that was passed unanimously that session . I have a sneaking suspicion that he is letting the Tanaka Farms off lightly unless this farmer is unusual. Farmers are usually loath to allow outsiders onto their farms…one of the issues addressed in the omnibus bill. He somehow gained their trust. Very tricky.

Writing From The Ground

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New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.