January 6, 2010

Today we arrived in Santa Maria Tindu, although a couple hours later than planned. A tire blowout and a longer route from Huajuapan ended up costing us time.

We serendipitously planned our visit for the best time of year as today is Dia de los Reyes (the most celebrated day of Christmas season) and people have traveled from afar to see their families. Our host, Ramon, is in town for the month to take care of his parents and fix up the house while he’s there. Even with so many people in town visiting their parents like Mario (this is not his real name), many of the houses in the street still lie empty. Mario’s parent’s house, where we are staying, is a two-story cinderblock house with electricity and running water. He helped build the house for his parents and the town’s sewage system was created 3 years ago by a committee made up of those like Mario who live in the U.S. and visit their hometown. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to take care of your parents from such a long distance. He said he mails one or two hundred dollars every three months. Still, his father’s already 87 and it makes me a little nervous every time I see him try to walk up and down the concrete stairs.

On the second floor, there is a main room next to our two rooms where all the dried corn is kept. There are two huge piles on the floor, slightly off to the side, to allow room for people to get by. One is of white husked ears and the other is yellow. All this corn has come from his father’s field, Ramon explains. We’re all impressed, especially since his father is so old. We have some difficulty trying to ask his father about the farming since he can’t hear very much, but when we gesture at the corn he shrugs and says, “Es mi trabajo.” It’s my job. In many ways, Ramon’s father has remained the same in the face of so much change. He refuses to wear a hearing aid, he’s the only one in his direct family to still be able to speak Mixtec, and he still farms with animal-pulled plows.

But a lot in the town has changed. There have been some improvements as a result of the remittances like street lamps, nicer houses, a new drainage system. But the puebla has also turned into a ghost town. Mario explains that many of the houses around here “estan cerradas” are closed. Ramon tries to recall the number of families who still live on the street his parents live on: about 4 or 5. As we walk along the street he points out the houses “this house is empty, these people haven’t lived here for 5 or 7 years”- he points to one of the few houses with a light on- “and these people are here, but they only come once a year for the holidays.”

The holidays are a pretty festive time here. Everywhere we go, there are nativity scenes, or nacimientos, made out of figurines, moss, lights, and dolls. People eat Rosca de Reyes, a wreath-shaped sweet bread. Our hostess fed us some and it was great. Similar to Mardi Gras’ Kings Cake, there is a little figure in the cake and whoever gets the figure in their piece has to throw the party next year. Seeing everyone gathered together celebrating the holidays in this ghost town, I can’t help but wonder what the future will bring for Santa Maria Tindu. There are a few kids running around now, but how many of them will return to Madera, California with their parents after the party is over? We asked Mario if he will come back to retire in Tindu. He says he wants to but he doesn’t know if it will happen. And what if your children stay in Oregon, where they currently live? Then I don’t know, he says. Currently, he thinks that there are about 1,000 people from Santa Maria Tindu living in Madera, California and 400 more in Oregon. He has four kids and his oldest is going to college in Oregon this year. It’s not easy living in between two different worlds. Santa Maria Tindu seems a completely different place from Washington, but many of the people who are here are also my neighbors in the Pacific Northwest. As WDA-ers, we came here with the intention of both learning and helping, but the more I learn, the more helpless I feel. John asks Mario if the town will ever return to the way it was before. Sure it could, Mario says, people grew corn and tomatoes and beans and they could do that again. John points out that in order for that to happen, people would have to get paid, and that depends more on the economy than on whether or not people want to emigrate.

–Jojo

A rudimentary understanding of Mexico’s economic history is necessary to set the context for examining the roots of migration in Oaxaca and the powerful stories of our friends from Santa Maria Tindu. I am no economics major, and don’t specialize in Mexican history, so this is meant only to be a brief summary of the most important and startling information that contributes to Mexico’s current economic condition and its relationship to the United States. My apologies for leaving so much out, my mistakes, and painting too simple of a picture. The vast majority of this story is drawn from the extensive presentations of Witness for Peace and EDUCA, and I am largely trying to relate much of their message without speaking directly for them.

During roughly the first half of the Cold War, the United States practiced a policy of containment liberalism, which meant Mexico was flooded with U.S. dollars in support of national industry, money with few stipulations or oversight to its use as long as the country remained a strong U.S. ally. This contributed to a culture of corruption and continued expectations of free money with few strings attached. When the oil crisis and subsequent recession hit in the 1970’s, western banks swollen with petro dollars from OPEC members had billions in their coffers and a “developed” world still struggling in the recession and borrowing little. Bankers and politicians turned to the developing world, offering billions and billions in petro dollar loans for the first time, with extremely low (though variable) interest rates, and you guessed it, few controls. From 1970-1982, Presidents Verria and Portilla borrowed these billions, amassing a staggering national debt. To pay the interest on these loans, Mexico pumped more and more oil at the expense of other national industries; by the mid-80s oil would account for 75% of their export revenue! Subsequently, the “Green Revolution,” pushed by governments and billed as the solution to world hunger, forced many Mexican farmers away from traditional (and more sustainable) methods of farming to fertilizer and machinery, exposing new vulnerabilities.

Then, the era of Regan and Thatcher began in 1981, and with it their decision to fervently promote pure free-market capitalism and free trade. For the developing word this meant a crucial shift in production for internal to external consumption. Then in 1982, the Volcker shot spiked interest rates in order to revalue the dollar. This, along with a rapid drop in oil prices, irresponsible borrowing, corruption, and a recession in the U.S. and Europe that left Mexico with no market for its goods, create what WFP called “Mexcio’s Perfect Storm:” in August Mexico went into debt crisis and threatened to default on its loans. Who should swoop in but the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with a 7 billion dollar loan in and its now infamous Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). It “rescued” Mexico again in 1988 and 1992 (the last rescue package was a $95 billion loan). In the decade-long process the SAPs decimated Mexico’s social security net with austerity programs that cut social services, especially health and education, eliminated price controls for corn and coffee, destabilized wages and devalued the peso, and sold off profitable state-owned industries to foreign investors while international investment put small and medium-sized enterprises out of business. Not surprisingly, these programs resulted in an increase in poverty, social conflict, and migration.

This is the backdrop out of which NAFTA emerged, the subject of Pt.2, which will appear tomorrow. We returned from our visit to Santa Maria Tindu a little after ten tonight, which was an amazing but also painful and sad experience. The people there have giving hearts and beautiful souls. I was also told I could handle spice like a real Mexican today (made my trip)! There will also be much more on our visit tomorrow. Quite frankly, we were going to have posts up tonight but ended up talking till 1:30 about this trip, the project, WDA, activism, and the immigration dilemma, and didn’t get to all of the actual writing.

¡y ahora duermo!

–john

Greetings Friends and Fellow WDAers!

JoJo, Kristen, and I arrived in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca last night after a few long days of travel (though nothing compared to the arduous three-day journey my bag took to get here from Virginia)! It has been almost a year to the day since we first met with Francisco Lopez, President of the Oregon Immigrants´ Rights Coalition (CAUSA), and embarked on a project to research the root causes of Oaxacan migration to the United States and work with Oaxacan Hometown Assosciation´s (HTAs), and the transborder communities they serve to promote sustainable community development. Our original goal was to unite Oaxacan home town associations into a coalition, but after a painful learning process both WDA and CAUSA realized this was unrealistic (and let’s face it, overambitious for us non-Oaxacan college students). However, we were fortunate that in the process we were introduced to two groups of Oaxacan immigrants working on development projects in their home communities. Since late August of this year, we have met with these HTAs, brainstormed projects, researched medical and fundraising resources to connect to the communities, and collected dental and school supplies. It´s safe to say it feels amazing to finally be on the ground seeing for ourselves what we´ve heard and learned so much about and actually getting down to action after so many iterations of our project.

Today was the first day of a jam-packed itinerary that will take us not only to Oaxaca City but the villages of Santa Maria Tindu and Barranca Fierro Mixteca. After breakfast and introductions to the rest of the delegation, which is comprised of brilliant people doing great work (hopefully a little more on this later in the trip), we spent all morning and half the afternoon with part of Mexico´s Witness for Peace team (WFP), Alexis and Dunya. It was a crash course in the origins of neoliberalism, globalization and the rise of the IMF and the World Bank, Mexico´s economic history leading up to NAFTA, a broad analysis of the agreement´s effects since its implementation in 1994, and U.S.-Mexico relations post 9-11, ie the Security and Prosperity Partnership and the Meridia Initiative. Clearly, this post could go on forever, but I´ll save our individual responses, including more details and analysis, for a separate post. We wrapped up the session with group trips to different markets to get average prices for subsistence goods such as kilos of chicken, rice, tortillas, and black beans. After dinner we calculated how many hours a worker being paid the minimum wage here, $4 a day, must work in order to afford these items, and what the equivalent cost would be in US dollars if this was the minimum wage in the states. The results were staggering; a kilo of chicken here costs more than we pay for a pound of premium steak at home and takes about half of an 8 hour work day to earn.

Our afternoon and early evening was spent listening to a wonderful presentation and engaging in a dialogue on the roots of Oaxacan migration and its effects on Oaxaca´s communities with Miguel Vasquez of EDUCA. He saw three main causes: violence and conflict, poverty, and exclusion of the indigenous community. Clearly, these roots have roots, but the overwhelming theme for the day was that until there is systemic change in both transborder relations and Mexico itself, including a renogiation of NAFTA (another separate post), these problems will not be solved and the inextricably linked cycles of poverty, violence, and exclusion will continue, with millions being forced to migrate.

In seven short hours, we will be heading out for our first visit to Santa Maria Tindu, where we will stay with families and begin work on creating media to assist in their HTA´s fundraising for a community center that public health, education, and political organization, among other things, can call home.

We will be blogging furiously upon return in three days or so, and hope you stay tuned. We can already feel ourselves becoming more articulate and educated advocates for immigrant rights, which are human rights, and all the policies that this entails. It´s going to be an amazing trip.

Hello Everyone,

Gauri, Kailey, Tim, and I arrived back in Walla Walla last night after a two-day trip down to Woodburn, OR to meet with Francisco Lopez and have our first appointments at the Mexican consulate and two Oaxacan leaders. We arrived Thursday afternoon and saw the PCUN office for the first time. It was a spacious building that was once an old Methodist church and had probably functioned as a house as well at some point in its rich history. Francisco told us many times in the course of a few days that he keeps telling the union to sell the building and get new offices: “They won’t do it!” he says; it has “too much sentimental value.”

After talking briefly with Francisco in the office about the basic operations of PCUN, CAUSA, and their sister organizations, he gave us the grand tour of Woodburn. We saw fields and restaurants, the Oregon Law Center, the town square, PCUN’s radio station, and the new and still under-construction farm labor housing the union had such a strong hand in building. After the tour, we returned to PCUN’s conference room and hashed out more project details, as well as went over who we were meeting with the next day and our objectives for each meeting. We came up with a to-do list of both short and long-term goals, and the most detailed timeline for our project yet. Naturally, the most exciting part of a very compelling meeting was when we discussed our trip to Oaxaca, scheduled for January 2010. Francisco talked about how “then we would see and really feel” the reasons for this project of empowering Oaxacans on both sides of the border: simply so that they can create better lives for their people.

The next morning we drove up to Portland to meet with Ursula Rojas at the Mexican Consulate, who heads the Institute for Mexicans Abroad (IME) in Oregon. She told us the institute exists to foster a close and beneficial relationship with Mexican communities abroad and to allow the diaspora to influence public policy back in Mexico. Since IME is part of the Mexican government, it was fascinating and informative to here the government’s take on Mexican immigration to El Norte. She also talked to us about the government’s 3×1 Development Program, where Hometown Associations (HTAs) put up 25% of the cost for a project that could range from infrastructure construction to planting trees or starting businesses, and different levels of the government provide the other 75% of funding. We learned that there are seven known Oaxacan HTAs in Oregon, which was very exciting news. Approximately 11% of the counted 350,000 migrants in Oregon are Oaxacan, and the Portland Consulate is 5th in the nation in the number of registered Oaxacans.

Also present at the consulate meeting was an enthusiastic Oaxacan immigrant named Donaciano Garcia who founded Generacion Barranca 2006. Barranca is Garcia’s hometown, and the organization, though not exactly an HTA by an academic definition, is very similar (I have a feeling it will become apparent quickly that there is no exact model for Oaxacan HTAS, which may actually be beneficial to the project. It just means the different groups will have that much more to offer each other). Comprised of friends and family members, GB2006 sustained itself through $50 a month dues and fundraisers like car washes and “adopt-a-child” style programs at Garcia’s church. The organization believes that the children of Barranca are the future; hope so that one day, “none of us will have to work in the fields anymore.” They are investing as much as possible in the children’s education, and have delivered five new computers to the school, as well as 70 bicycles so that students don’t have to walk so long to get to school, or to Oaxaca City to do their homework, and also planted 120 fruit trees. Some future goals are so modest as to be humbling: Garcia wants to get to two water fountains so that the children don’t have to risk getting sick from drinking out of the same bucket with one cup anymore. Others are ambitious and accomplish the exact same thing: “It is my dream to see a university there one day,” he says, beaming. Garcia’s passion for his work was evident and contagious. When we told him we were visiting Oaxaca in January he graciously invited us to come visit Barranca. “Together, we will walk,” he said, showing us a picture of the winding dirt road leading to the village with children running ahead of the camera, “and you will see.”

For the last meeting of the day the WDA team and Francisco drove back to Woodburn to meet Carmen Ramirez for lunch at Luis’s (Obama stopped there for lunch on the campaign trail; we had to try it). Carmen is an Oaxacan immigrant who organizes for PCUN, as well as volunteers her services as an indigenous translator for both the consulate and the Oregon Law Center. One of her largest projects right now is fighting sexual harassment in the fields and workplace through educational campaigns aimed at both men and women. She told us, with Francisco and Kailey doing excellent translation work, of the discrimination that the indigenous Oaxacans face in the larger Mexican community in both the U.S. and Mexico. Furthermore, the language barrier often prevents migrants from knowing their rights, or that they have any rights at all anywhere along their northward journey (most Oaxacans migrate slowly northward in step movements, working and saving money as they go for the eventual border crossing). She told us the story of a single father and friend whose young boy lost an arm to a reckless rancher’s son in a pickup in Guerrero, Mexico. They were refused health care several times for being poor and indigenous. The father couldn’t go to court because he doesn’t speak Spanish, and the pesos the rancher gave him aren’t even enough to buy a prosthetic limb. “It breaks my heart,” she says, “and there are many like this. It makes me feel and this is why I help my community . . . I am a mother, and this is no tragedy any parent should have to suffer.” She also explained to us many facets of Oaxacan culture and how the indigenous community inherently runs up against the established system, the one-time colonizer. “And it’s even worse when they don’t speak the language,” she tells us, “so hard to survive.” Finally, she explained the frustration she feels with the Mexican government and the current migrant condition: “They say Mexico is fine, we won’t be affected by the crisis . . . This is wrong. We indigenous people, we are being hurt the worst. They can lay us off without a reason, without any compensation, and we are in the street with nowhere to go, unable to apply for benefits, unable to feed our families.”

When we questioned all three of the kind people that spoke to us about the role WDA and CAUSA could play in assisting Oaxacan organizations, all three spoke of the need for greater collaboration between Oaxacan groups and involved institutions. Carmen pointed out that most migrants want to help, to try to make things better, but they aren’t specialists and don’t know where to start. “You will see,” Francisco told us, “they all want the same thing. They just need a little push.”

Today, Tim explained why he felt the trip was so important and why WDA is on the right track:

I think this trip was especially valuable because, in a relatively short amount of time, we were able to see the complex diversity of perspectives and priorities of the various community partners we will be working with to form a network. These differences illuminate how one of the main challenges of our project may be identifying and emphasizing the common agendas that can serve as a foundation for collaboration. The fact that hometown association goals and projects may be somewhat fragmented in their current state of autonomy also points to need for bringing the various parties together for constructive dialog and cooperative planning, as this project is designed to do.

Gauri also talked about the personal benefits of the short trip for her:

This trip really helped ground the project for me. Everything from revising and finishing the concept paper to meeting people who had worked in the fields really helped get me excited for the project. The fact that Garcia’s organization had plenty of members and human support, but struggled putting together material and developing a logo, while we have an abundance of material but were struggling with membership until recently, made me realize that we have a lot to learn and a lot to offer too.

Before this trip, I think many of us in WDA were struggling with the feeling that this project didn’t have as much of a human aspect or wouldn’t have as much of a direct impact. After spending only two days actually looking at places where migrants live and talking migrants and those who work with them, that feeling is no longer a problem. The talks we had with Ursula, Garcia, and Carmen were inspiring, intentional or not. We’re very excited that the project is finally taking off and had such a good start.

Peace,

John

As the countdown for the start of a new school year enters its final few days, the group’s excitement is growing rapidly. In a May post that feels only days old, I wrote that WDA was looking forward to the upcoming year. Well now it’s almost here, and those words feel like a drastic understatement. Of course, not too much has changed in terms of new project development, though the organization has not remained stagnate over the summer months. We’ve all been doing background reading on our upcoming project, the loosely titled Trans-Border Initiative, in addition to finishing up the Sadhana Clean Water Project and working on a myriad of smaller internal projects. One WDAer, Melissa, spent most of her summer in Peru polishing her Spanish and working with an NGO on a literacy project, among other things. Look for more information and commentary on her experiences coming soon.

But I should pause and fill in the newcomers with a brief description of this year’s project. In the Trans-Border Initiative, WDA will be conducting research among the migrant Latino populations of Eastern Washington in an investigation pointed at an eventual project that works to fight economic stagnation in migrant’s home communities in Mexico. Work will begin in earnest as soon as everyone gets back on campus and settled in.

Besides the new project, there is much currently going on with WDA. Look for us at the Student Activities fair on the Cordiner Side Lawn at Whitman on Monday, September 1st from 12-3pm. We would love to have some new faces to start off the year. Also, as I mentioned before in the last May post, for the first year ever WDA will be working with a Board of Advisers to plan for the future, get advice on the project and finances, and to have central, organized access to a wealth of knowledge and experience. The board is made up of volunteer faculty members and we are excited to announce this productive addition to the organization.

Also, WDA is looking to revamp its website in the near future, and is on the hunt for a student web designer who would like to join the organization and work with us on designing and launching a new site. Of course, we would love someone who wanted to work on the project as well, but I wouldn’t call it an obligation at this point. Please email me at johnloranger@whitmandirectaction.org if you’re interested or have someone to recommend we contact.

That’s basically it for now. Look for much more in the near future!
Peace and Love,
John