Wherever we go, there we are

BY STAN GOTLIEB

Almost every year, Diana and I make the trek to California to consult with our medicos and visit with family and friends. By the time you read this, we will have left California to return to our home in Oaxaca. We will return with medicine, a few new pieces of clothing, some books and CDs, and news for our friends about “life on the other side.” By and large, it will not be an uplifting scenario.

The U.S., we will sadly report, is still unwilling to offer a meaningful reform of its immigration laws, preferring instead to further criminalize “illegal” entrants, in order to ensure a large and compliant pool of cheap workers for the U.S. labor market. The tens of thousands of Oaxacans—who this year, unable to find employment at a living wage, will attempt to migrate to this side of the border—will face a situation both more dangerous and more expensive. No matter, we will be told with a sad shake of the head: Migration or starvation doesn’t leave much of a choice, and dying in the desert trying to do better for your family is no worse than dying from some preventable disease or watching your children do so.

Remittances from family members working in the slaughterhouses of Arkansas or the Carolinas, or stooping in the fields of California and Florida, or washing dishes in Minnesota or New York, are virtually the sole income of countless logged-out, eroded, desert-ified mountain villages that used to provide a basic food basket for their inhabitants before the multinational mining, lumber and paper companies destroyed their ecology, polluted their water table, and then left to do the same to others like them.

Our mass media, we will tell them, continue to demonize those in Mexico who struggle for a better life for the People. The newspapers regularly use the pretense of “fairness” to sell us the idea that spray painting slogans on public buildings is just as bad as assassinating, arresting, beating, torturing and “disappearing” hundreds of social change activists every year; they repeat the official pretense that there is no evidence pointing to who is responsible for these violations of human rights and dignity. In this, we will point out—as if they didn’ t already know—the U.S. press is little different from their own corporate media.
We will report that this year’s May Day/Cinco de Mayo season, while the U.S. Congress was “considering” the immigration reform package, their compadres, battered by a series of highly publicized Migra raids, stayed home in fear when called upon to march for immigrant rights. We will explain how television stories (about children born in the U.S., who had never been across the border, and who were now faced with the choice of remaining here in foster care of some sort or leaving the only life they have ever known to join their deported parents) contributed to the atmosphere of fear and anxiety.

eligious foundations. The money, we will tell them, is drying up, partly due to prosecutions (based on testimony from infiltrated agents) for doing service work for the unrepresented. This is partly due to the increase in other needs since past sources of aid have been cut off by the government due to the ascendancy of neo-conservative notions and the draining of the national treasury by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With its staff slashed in a period of escalating need from its client population, it has gone from a proactive stance to doggedly trying to perform social triage.

In turn, we will hear from our friends in Oaxaca about how the neo-conservative government of President Felipe Calderón, with the cooperation of the currently weakened old ruling party of the PRI, have been moving to make Mexico more welcoming to the transnational corporations that have been so influential in our own country; how the secret police and intelligence agencies, having been granted millions for the purpose by the U.S., are busy setting up the same sort of extra-legal system of surveillance that we now suffer from in this country; and how the fruits of this poisoned tree will be shared between the two countries, ostensibly to stem the flow of drugs and gang violence but actually to suppress dissent.

We will spend hours every day trying to keep up with the changes in the volatile alliances that make up the popular resistance, and we will marvel at how, in the face of all the repressive forces of the State, our neighbors still maintain their struggle for social change. Unable to physically take part in acts of protest—foreigners who do are subject to deportation—we will make anonymous contributions and continue to document the situation as best we can.
Like many of our neighbors, both here and there, we have become part of a new breed of people, equally at home—and equally alienated—on both sides of the border.

Stan Gotlieb lives and writes from Mexico.