Ciudad Juarez Students Rise Up

For at least the last three years over six people have died each day, violently, within view of the U.S. Almost 200 people a month, many of them young people. Over 2,000 each year.

Many of us here in the U.S., Chicano and otherwise, don't seem directly affected by this bloodbath. We may not live close to the border and avoid visiting Mexico because of the potential for violence. I'm one of those.

We don't have to think about it much and can set it aside and comment "Too bad" or "Pobre Mexico." We might even pride ourselves on not doing drugs and assume that what happens there is no individual fault of our own.

While I don't agree with such thinking, I sometimes wonder what I would do, or would have done when younger, if I lived as a mejicano amidst the horrendous chaos that is life in Mexico, especially the border and other areas.

I liken it to imagining how would I have handled myself as a German citizen in the 30's when the Nazis were rising to power. Would I have been a "good German" or would I have abandoned my country or would I have wound up getting gassed in an oven?

I wonder how closely today's Mexico is to that Nazi Germany. Government complicity, worldwide inaction or appeasement and institutional violence against citizenry play/played roles in both situations. Maybe there are many more parallels. Especially, I wonder, is what goes on today across the border just a modern version of a "final solution."

In any case, news pieces like we reprint below, however tragic, indicate there will always be those who don't go quietly into the night nor go along with the status quo, no matter the risks.

As you read it, put yourself in the shoes of those who experience, even daily, what you read transpires there. We owe much to those involved. Try a little introspection and let me know if you come up with something you want to share.

RudyG

Ciudad Juarez News, 11. 3. 10

For months Ciudad Juarez's Plural Citizens Front and other opponents of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's so-called drug war planned an international forum on violence and militarization in their battle-weary city.

Ironically, on the first day of the October 29-31 event, a bloody incident of the kind activists were protesting marred the meeting site at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB) of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. Eyewitnesses told Frontera NorteSur that members of Mexico's Federal Police opened fire on young people who had just participated in the 11th Walk against Death and were arriving to the campus to initiate the left-oriented forum.

The apparent targets were a small group of unarmed, masked youth affiliated with the pro-Zapatista Other Campaign which had trailed the demonstration to spray paint walls with political slogans. As the group was running from police and towards an entrance to the ICB, shots rang out. A bullet struck 19-year-old protestor and university student Jose Dario Alvarez Orrantia in the back, spilling the young man’s guts on the pavement.

"He survived by a miracle, said Dr. Arturo Valenzuela, who performed emergency surgery on Alvarez. "Until now, we are very pleased to have saved Dario."

Outraged by the shooting, students temporarily occupied the ICB administration building. "An injury to one is an injury to all," read one banner hanging from the building.

With Dario Alvarez's blood staining one of the ICB´S entrances, marked off by a crude crime scene blocked off with a circle of rocks and a hand-written sign, the three-day forum proceeded in a tense atmosphere. The steady wail of ambulances passing near the ICB and the thud of gunshots in the distance were an audible reminder of the violence carving the rhythm of life in the border city.

The Federal Police shooting scared away many people who had planned attending the forum, said co-organizer Gabriela Beltran, who charged the Mexican government with staging the attack to undermine the meeting.

”The forum was meant to talk precisely about these types of situations in which the state has us submerged,” Beltran said.

Corroborated by Dr. Valenzuela, local news outlets quickly reported that a handful of Federal Police officers were detained by their superiors for the Alvarez shooting, but Beltran complained that nobody knew the identities of the supposedly arrested policemen and that a serious investigation was not underway.

For Rita del Castillo, the trip to the forum was a painful stop on a long journey that’s followed the drug war from the jungles of South America to the desert mesas of the borderland.

The mother of Juan Gonzalez del Castillo, a Mexico City student killed along with three other Mexican students in an unauthorized Ecuadoran encampment of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in March 2008, del Castillo came to the forum accompanied by the mother of another slain student to build support for their relatives’ movement aimed at bringing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to justice.

A fifth Mexican student who was part of the group, Lucia Morett, survived the US-backed military assault but is now wanted by Interpol on terrorism-related charges filed by the Colombian government. The attack by the Colombian government also resulted in the killing of FARC negotiator Raul Reyes and nearly resulted in a war involving Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Del Castillo insisted that her son and his friends were not terrorists but students on an academic research trip.

In her first visit to Ciudad Juarez, del Castillo arrived at the ICB just in time to hear shots puncturing the early evening and then see Dario Alvarez writhing on the ground.

“As parents this also fills us with indignation, and we extend our solidarity to the young people of the university, the university community and the family members of the young man wounded here yesterday on the university campus,” del Castillo said.

The October 29 shooting took place in the context of escalating violence in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of Mexico, including the slayings of four factory employees of a foreign manufacturing company in the Juarez Valley only days before the forum.

Contrary to rosy assessments of the drug war’s progress, such events demonstrate an overall deterioration of the public safety situation, said Victor Quintana, former Mexican lawmaker and adviser to the Democratic Campesino Front of Chihuahua. Condemning Alvarez's shooting, Quintana said similar incidents cannot be allowed to happen.

Occupying the ICB campus during the weekend which immediately preceded Mexico’s Days of the Dead holidays, Dario Alvarez’s fellow students strategized their response to the police shooting of their friend.

In an exercise of direct democracy rarely seen in Mexico or the US, the students met in popular assemblies to carefully analyze, debate and decide possible courses of action.

A solemn mood characterized the meetings, shaped by the historical knowledge of the impact students have had at other times in Mexican history, such as the 1968 student mobilization that culminated in the October 2 government slaughter of protesters in Mexico City's Tlatelolco.

“We are for the transformation of the world,” one student told his assembled classmates. “Another world is possible, and we are beginning it here in Ciudad Juarez."

Within hours of Alvarez’s shooting, messages of outside support were coming to Ciudad Juarez students. In short order, the event was acquiring national political ramifications. Speeches at the forum urging the cut off of US security assistance to Mexico and a sweeping redirection in the drug war gained resonance.

Locally, much of the political class and media downplayed, ignored and even distorted the October 29 incident. However, a group of prominent Ciudad Juarez academics and citizen activists authored an opinion piece for the October 31 edition of the city´s daily Norte newspaper.

Slamming human rights violations and the killing of young people in different parts of Mexico, the column posed a question:

“How much blood of innocent civilians, of the children and of the young, will have to run until the government comprehends that its public safety strategy and little war against organized crime is a noisy disaster?”

The statement was signed by Alfredo Nateras, Carlos Cruz, Julia Monarrez, Irma Saucedo, Luciana Ramos, and Lucia Melgar.

On Nov. 2 and 3, Ciudad Juarez students and their allies once again took to the streets. According to local media reports, the first march drew at least 1,500 people.

The demonstrators demanded justice for Dario Alvarez and other youthful victims of violence, the demilitarization of Ciudad Juarez and the withdrawal of the Federal Police from the city.

Reportedly greeted by generous honks of support from passing motorists, the mass protest represented “a university movement that hasn’t occurred in Ciudad Juarez since the beginning or middle of the 1980s,” declared the website of the Arrobajuarez.com news service.

Meanwhile, on many fronts, struggling civil society organizations wage a fight for peace and reconstruction in Ciudad Juarez. Once the poster child for the booming global economy of the late 20th century, Ciudad Juarez now hosts a “broken society,” said university student and health promoter Perla Davila. “Everyone” has been affected one way or another by the carnage that’s left about 7,000 people murdered since the beginning of 2008, Davila contended.

A psychology major, Davila works for a new non-profit organization, SABIC, which employs traditional herbal healing, alternative medicine and therapy to assist victims of violence. In its first year of operation, SABIC has attended about 5,000 people in ten community centers scattered across Ciudad Juarez, Davila told Frontera NorteSur.

Juarenses, she said, are sunk in a “tremendous stress” that shows no signs of letting up. The shooting of Jose Dario Alvarez Orrantia, Davila maintained, only adds to the official disdain of her troubled city and its embattled residents.

Said Davila: “We are trying to find an exit…nobody has a manual on how to survive a social war, on how to survive the war of a government that doesn’t want to listen, that doesn’t want to see what it is causing--especially in the young part of society.”

Additional sources: Diario de Juarez Nov. 3, 2010.
Arrobajuarez.com, Nov. 3, 2010. Norte, Oct. 31, 2010.

© 2010 Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University Las Cruces, N.M.

For a free electronic subscription email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu

Review: Revenge of the Saguaro; Bits 'n pieces.

Tom Miller. Revenge of the Saguaro. Offbeat Travels Through America's Southwest. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2010.

ISBN: 1-933693-60-6 and 9781933693606

Michael Sedano

Back in 2000 and again in 2002, the National Geographic Society published Tom Miller's Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink. Now, in 2010, EPT's Cinco Puntos Press republishes the volume, retitled with the more southwesty title, Revenge of the Saguaro. Offbeat Travels Through America's Southwest

Under its former title, 368 libraries from California to Australia according to WorldCat, shelve the seven-essay Jack Ruby. Cinco Puntos’ addition of two essays not in the earlier volume, the title piece, “Revenge of the Saguaro” and “The Occidental Tsuris,” should find welcome space in those libraries, and your own.

Shared in common are seven essays, including “The Great Stinking Desert,” “What Is the Sound of One Billboard Falling?”, “Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink,” “Searching for the Heart of ‘La Bamba’,” “Hollywood Goes Southwest,” “Death by Misadventure,” and “The Free State of Cochise.”

Miller’s style bears repeating, he must feel, because every essay assumes the same voice and similar structure. The title conveys the major theme, but Miller’s way is theme and variations. His “La Bamba” essay, for example, begins with a consideration of a travel music mix for a Southwest jaunt, selected for location. Depending upon where your wheels are rolling, sounds would include Indian flute by R. Carlos Nakai, country folk by Latie Lee, chicken scratch music by Joe Miguel and the Blood Brothers, Alice Cooper because you're in his hometown, cantina rolas from Los Blues Ventures, and broadly regional work from Los Lobos and Los Tigres del Norte. One song, Miller suggests, fits the entire region, “La Bamba.”

The essay looks at the Ritchie Valens oldie rock version then explores further south into Veracruz and jarocho music, then back into history with Cortés and the European invasion’s syncretic influences on Mexican sounds. Miller’s musical journey U-turns from Xalapa to McCarthysim, noting folksinger Travis Edmonson was hauled before “a congressional hearing because he performed a foreign folk tune assumed to be about the bomb.”

Enriching the essay, Miller doesn’t drop "La Bamba" and stop there. Instead, he circles around the rim of the Morenci mine, delving into its ballad, “Open Pit Mine,” then heads east to the west Texas town of El Paso and Marty Robbins' hit about wicked Felina and a wild young cowboy’s misplaced passion. True to his travel genre, Miller takes you not only through the song but also to the “real” Rosa’s Cantina and associated ironies.

The title essay,"Revenge of the Saguaro," offers a gem of storytelling and righteous retribution. In a well-refined narrative, Miller tells of the death of a loser named David Grundman. Having told the story numerous times, Miller observes, not a single listener expressed any remorse over Grundman’s death. I am not the first to feel it, nor will you. You, as I, will side with Ha:san, a Saguaro cactus.

The essay links Ha:san's growing years to historical benchmarks. Saguaros themselves have populated the earth for 10,000 years. Ha:san germinated as a microscopic seedling during the hegemony of James Buchanan. In this period, the Supremes hand down their mistaken Dred Scott decision, some invader discovers gold along the Gila River, and Mexicanos are being swindled out of their lands and culture supposedly guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

In 1912, Ha:san’s tierra becomes the State of Arizona. Now 55 years old and standing 8 feet tall, Ha:san blooms.

Miller builds a loving biography of the magnificent cactus, contrasting it to the meaningless life of an easterner who moves to Arizona at age 21, the Attica parolee, Grundman.

One happy sad day, Grundman and his pal load up on ammo and birongas and drive out to the wilderness where Grundman and pal kill a half-dozen Saguaros of varying sizes and histories. When Grundman drops the hammer on Ha:san, the hundred twenty-five year old 3000 pound magnificence refuses to fall. The drunken pendejo attacks Ha:san with the dried rib of a long-dead Saguaro. Too close, menso. Whump! Grundman is felled by Ha:san’s 500 pound arm. Then Whu-ump! Ha:san herself, devastated by the frenzied attack and unbalanced from her lost arm, succumbs to gravity and comes crashing down on the exact spot where Grundman lies under the fallen arm. “The joke was on David Grundman, and so was Ha:san. . . . Grundman lay face-up, dead beneath a ton and a half and 125 years of cactus…Natural selection had played its hand.”

The title story alone is well worth the time spent with Tom Miller’s ambling, oft intricate story-telling. You’ll likely enjoy the history of velvet painting, backstage stuff on the films “Milagro Beanfield War” and “Salt of the Earth,” ride-alongs with eco-terrorists, and ample helpings of social irony and salutes to lost causes and Miller's personal heroes.

I hope you’ll read and enjoy Revenge of the Saguaro. If so, you’ll also enjoy William Least Heat Moon’s Blue highways : a journey into America for much the same reasons. They're the same book, only different. Per WorldCat, the latter is available in only 68 libraries worldwide, a real lastima because these two titles are kissin’ cousins of the curious byways of United States culture.

News from the heartland

You'll have to be a local, or traveling through Kansas City Missouri, to enjoy La Bloga guest bloguera Xánath Caraza and friends reading at The Writers Place. (Click image for a larger view):

Readers everywhere will appreciate the news from the Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose & Independent Books. The Latino Writers Collective's prose collection, Cuentos del Centro, reviewed at La Bloga last July, is shortlisted for the Hoffer's Montaigne Medal. From the Hoffer website:

The Eric Hoffer Award for short prose and books was established at the start of the 21st century as a means of opening a door to writing of significant merit. It honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small publishers. The winning stories and essays are published in Best New Writing, and the book awards are covered in the US Review of Books.

¡Felicidades to Latino Writers Collective of Kansas City MO, and publisher Scapegoat Press!

Prayers for the Women of Juarez

This is the final week of the 40 day vigil around the world dedicated to the femicide victims in Juarez. In Los Angeles, Casa 0101 annex, 2102 E. 1st St. Los Angeles, CA 90033, closes an art exhibit curated by Victoria Delgadillo. Click here for details.

The image below comes from poet Don Newton of La Palabra, one of five artists whose joint effort created the image based roughly on a poem by Judith Terzi. The five artists are: Poli Marichal, Marianne Sadowski, Kay Brown, Victor Rosas and Don Newton.

That's March's penultimate Tuesday, a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga. See you next Tuesday.

mvs

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Review: Ana Castillo. The Guardians.

The Guardians. A Novel.
NY: Random House, 2007.
978-1-4000-6500-4

Michael Sedano

Now that Ana Castillo has left Chicago for southern New Mexico's lonely ranchitos, she's also left behind her normally strong older woman character. Carmen la Coja, the one-legged flamenco dancer of Peel My Love Like an Onion, captivates her younger lover until he's no longer amusing and she locks him out of her high-rise apartment. In The Guardians, Regina's low self-esteem keeps her clumsily in the path of an ardent younger swain. They kiss, but that's the limit of their physical intimacy.

Regina's incompetency comes as quite a surprise, since so often a Castillo woman stands as a model of independence and growth, like la coja. But then, rural New Mexico presents its own set of challenges for Regina and the writer: Hardscrabble farming, limited job horizons, complications of la frontera for the characters. Sadly, Castillo allows herself to be trapped by the lurking conventionality of evil coyotes and gang members, turning the story into a mere thriller.

Not that The Guardians is a disappointment, far from it. The early chapters express affectionate involvement with a middle-aged woman eking a living on sandy plots, supplementing one's income with wild-haired schemes and a big heart. The plot wends its way into the Juarez murders of thousands of women, mixing it with immigrant smuggling, narcotraficantes, and evil coyotes. Borrowing from another Juarez murders novel, Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood, one of the key characters is kidnaped by the sex torturers, but unlike Gaspar de Alba, Castillo shies away from the gruesome details.

A four-voice novel, Castillo supplements Regina's narrative with nephew Gabo, would-be lover Michael, and Michael's WWII veteran cantinero grandfather. Regina is the stunning redhead teacher's aide, Michael the chongoed middle school historian who's dated every woman on the faculty with no results. Gabo's torment at his father's disappearance complicates his deterioration into madness. The blind abuelo if not quite a blind Tiresias is often the voice of common sense who keeps as even a keel as their circumstance permits.

They make an unlikely team of detectives. Worse, the camaraderie among them is never fully developed. And, as with any detective story, a lot of what happens is completely predictable, but Castillo serves up a couple of good surprises. The fun comes from letting the characters do their thing and see what happens when the dust settles.


Notes of a Distracted Driver

Traffic clogs to a stop just across the intersection. I stop at the yellow light, tensing that the driver too close behind me may be thinking to synchronize both of us running the light. Across the street, thronged pedestrians lean urgently against the traffic, expecting to dash out to catch the connecting bus pulling up just now.

A pig hauler has halted in the snarl. A sixteen wheel trailer, forty feet of meat hauled by a big rig diesel. The aluminum box heads to Farmer John, a mile down the street. Everything but the squeal.

The aluminum sides of the trailer reflect the dull morning light in a swath of grey. Perforations checker the sides, bulging here and there with pinkish-brown bristled flesh. The light changes. My lane advances faster than the pigs'. I catch up just as traffic slows again and I begin to stop. Up on the second level a pig snout prods the air up there. I hope it is sweeter than the exhausted contamination that keeps my windows tightly up. Still, I hit the window switch. One-handedly, I switch on my camera, point in the right direction, and shoot.

Both lanes come to a dead halt. The pig pulls back its snout, looks up at the brightness of the western sky, and smiles at the glory of the coming day.