May Day: Helping with the Migration Crisis Across Borders

For May Day, I will take part in one of the many marches against what trump is doing to immigration (I don't capitalize trump's name because he is not worthy). You can too: look at marches going on in A Day Without Immigrants!  More so, however, I will add my two grains of sand by writing about what we can do proactively to help immigrants today. 

I was thinking that, since trump was elected, he at least had to have a majority. Though that was never the case and he won through electoral politics, his popularity has suffered even more so since his election. A case in point: I was food shopping in my very conservative neighboorhood supermarket (I know: what am I still doing here?), when I saw a little note left for me on my car bumper, in response to a sticker I have: "Immigrants & Refugees WELCOME." 

The note said, verbatim: 

"Thank you for your bumper sticker. Immigrants & refugees are our neighbors" 😉

From this, I gather there is hope for everyone here in the United States: we are still a welcoming nation! I think my advice on helping asylum seekers and refugees, then, will come in handy, for those of you who really want ideas on next steps... 

THE MENUDO STORY

Great friends form friendships for different reasons, and these are prolonged because there is a spark that, once connected, cannot be broken. Julio César Guerrero and Lupe Rivera were activists together, and through all the years — the raza, the causa, the struggle — they shared their friendship always.

Though I did not know Mr. Rivera, I have come to appreciate him through Julio César's fond memories of him, and of the materials he’s sent me. In all this I kept seeing references to Lupe's love of food and making people happy with food.

His niece Marge Rivera Bermann captures that essence well when she ties wisdom with food: “...he seemed to never age. His experience brought him great wisdom and I loved to listen to him. I'll never forget the smell of barbacuo wafting through the house in the wee hours of Sunday morning as well as his empanadas de calabaza - the biggest and the best!"

So what better way to remember his friend than through a story of one of Lupe's favorite pastimes? Thank you, Julio César. I am sure Lupe is smiling where ever he may be. 

I was notified this summer of the passing of Lupe Rivera, a dear friend I met in the Quad-Cities area in the late sixties. QC is a cluster of cities located three hours west of Chicago and divided by the Mississippi River, which forms a natural border between Iowa and Illinois.

Guadalupe M. Rivera, 06/11/1933 - 5/5/2015

This is the largest metropolitan area in Illinois next to Chicago with Rock Island on one side — home base to the famous Rock Island Line — turned into a popular folk song by singer Johnny Cash, and Silvis, home of Hero Street, USA, subject of books and documentaries about a group of Mexican American soldiers on the other: these men lost their lives during WWII and the Korean War. On the Iowa side, too, there is Davenport, the city where Chicano rocker Ritchie Valens played his last concert before his plane crashed in the winter of 1959.

This entire area was a hub for large farm equipment manufacturers such as John Deere, International Harvester and CASE, which supported most of the local economy through good UAW Union salaries, benefits, and pensions. Despite the racism and discrimination in the railroad yard and foundries of the times (which still persist today), people of color could enjoy a basic middle class income that contrasted with the low wages and lousy working conditions of families employed in the agricultural fields of surrounding areas.

The Curse of the X Sound

I had the privilege to work with Julio César Guerrero during the National US tour of the Caravana 43 of the Ayotzinapa students and parents, who divided their caravana into three segments: the west, the central — where I met him — and the east branch. All then met again in Washington DC and New York City. Julio César took months to brilliantly orchestrate their entire trip, and he did so with passion and gusto. 
         Today, he offers some recollections of a different topic, but nevertheless these are fascinating to language lovers and history buffs. Soon too, he will fill us in with the back story of the months of planning for the Caravana43, since many of you have already read varied newstories of Ayotzinapa, though they keep on happening. 



I joined Michigan State University In the fall of 2003 as an advisor with the "Office of Cultural and Academic Transitions" under the student services division. OCAT was essentially one of the many benefits produced during the Civil Rights movement in the area of higher education, established for the purpose of not only increasing the number of minority students into universities but also, most importantly, of developing and nurturing a culturally sensitive environment on campus, since it fostered a drop-out prevention component.

My first week at work my supervisor told me, as a welcoming gesture, that he was glad I had joined the staff because Chicanos on campus, although not the largest minority, were the student group responsible for most of the political activism and organizing or — in his own words — the ones who “made the most noise.” By coincidence, that same week I was visited by a student member of MEChA who asked me for money to pay for an overnight delivery to the National MEChA Association board. As I understood, he needed to make the deadline for an appeal because the original membership application had been rejected.

MEChA: Student Movement of Chicanos from Aztlán
Union Is Strength!

All You Want To Know About Ayotzinapa & the Caravana 43!

I decided to collect articles and videos from Dallas as the Caravana 43 contingent from Ayotzinapa came through our city. 

Trying to place them all together in one place for easy access, my colleague Vanessa Vaile from Precarious Faculty -- an invaluable educator and friend -- helped me incredulously in getting this huge list together. 

Vanessa Vaile & me

But I am sure there are a lot more articles and other telling bits of information. 

Please let me know what they are: post them here, add to our growing list, so that we have a repository for the great activism and awareness we so need to achieve -- the movement we are trying to bring forth -- so that everyone becomes aware that the disappearance of 43 students is now much more than these 43 students. It marks the disappearance of these 43 plus 25 thousand more. And with them, it also recognizes that over 100,000 have been lost to the horror of drug-related violence and crime. 

But what is worst is that this travesty is condoned, accepted, even propagated by those in power. 

This movement, Ayotzinapa with the Caravana 43, concerns the insolence of a government that made the mistake to think that its people -- because they were poor -- could be bought. 

The Boys Behind the Symbol: Ayotzinapa

Where are the Ayotzinapa 43?

I first mentioned Ayotzinapa when I wrote about the tragedy of September 26th, 2014 in my other blog. Our loose group of grassroots activists had the first online encounter with the normalistas from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College, who had 43 students go missing from Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.  


So, as I have been saying for some time now — after the 43 students of Ayotzinapa were disappeared — and after the government tried to quiet the parents with bribes and threats and impunity and all sorts of bully tactics (which adjunct faculty know only too well!), some of the parents decided that the next step was to come to the United States to seek justice and awareness for their cause.


Some of the other parents decided to go to Europe, that way raising awareness worldwide.

The president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, came and went to the United States at the beginning of January to also ask for assistance for the opposite cause — to have us help him get his government back under his control. What kind of control would you call that when almost 10,000 deaths have been reported in his administration alone, even when Mexico was already rampant with dirty drug wars, crime, corruption?

Yet still the parents and remaining students persisted, as is their right.

"We want our children back: give us the truth! Vivos se los llevaron; vivos los queremos. Alive they were taken; alive we want them back."

In DC, on January 6th protesting Peña Nieto's visit to the United States
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

    I went to DC when Peña Nieto was here at the beginning of January, and it seemed quite the farce, all the antics both governments played together. What have we come to when our government condones the actions of a corrupt regime? Are we in league with the devil? Are we the devil? Why are we so eager to downplay the obvious ties to an unscrupulous system, a narco-government that gives no value to human life?

One of the things I ponder as I look through all the photographs and videos of the parents of the disappeared, is how venerated these students have become, yet how human they still remain.

New Year, New Beginnings

The Maize God as Scribe: The Maya Book of the Dead. 
The Ceramic Codex, University of Virginia Art Museum 

A couple of months ago, I began to write about a metamorphisis taking place within me, and with Adjunct Justice.

"During the next few weeks, my transformation will continue; from words my metamorphosis will transcend to the visual, and our forum will rise as from the ashes, or it will be rediscovered, much like the Mayan codices are deciphered day by day." 

I said that my blog Adjunct Justice did not only apply to faculty, but it also related to so many more marginalized populations.

Because of this, I want to depict this transfiguration, and to envision that we are not part of an old world, but now we shape this new and changing society, where things are always in upheaval, though there are characteristics that may remain constant.

In the 17th through 18th centuries in the Yucatán, Mexico, there were discovered certain books -- Miscellanies -- that described the coming together of both Spanish and indigenous thought. These books seemed the perfect blend, using the Mayan language, yet also the Latin alphabet. People say these manuscripts were written by a man called Chilam Balam. He seemed to have mysterious powers, as a chilam was a priest who phophesied the future, while balam was the name given to a jaguar.

What kind of magical creature was this Chilam Balam, who embodied such conflicting traits, and what intuition did he have?