In the past five years over 60,000 people have been murdered, over 5,000 have been “disappeared,” and over 160,000 have been forced to leave their homes in the joint Mexico-US “war on drugs.”  The number of deaths alone surpasses 20 September 11ths–but why should we in the US care?  Those people should not have gotten involved in the drug trade in the first place, right?

This is the kind of false impression that participants in the Caravan For Peace With Justice and Dignity hope to dispel.  Led by poet Javier Sicilia, the group of about 130 people representing over 200 organizations from both sides of the US/Mexico border will travel more than 6,000 miles with stops in over 20 US cities before arriving in DC on September 10.  Their aim, as Sicilia states in his profile as one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year, 2024” is to:

make visible the face of our national pain. The drug-war statistics were hiding those faces; the powers that be were trying to tell us that all those who were dying were just criminals, just cockroaches. We had to change that mind-set and put names to the victims for a change.

[Note: I want to emphasize, again, that a majority of the people murdered in the so called "drug war" are not involved in the drug trade--at least not by choice.  Yes, some are drafted and coerced into participating in the drug trade against their will, but many others are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Sicilia's son was murdered because a gangster thought his friends were going to report a camera theft to the police.  Margarita Lopez's daughter was kidnapped, raped, and tortured before being beheaded because somebody thought she could be ransomed.  Olga Reyes lost six family members (and 20 others have had to flee their homes) because she comes from a family of outspoken activists who have objected to unsafe nuclear waste disposal sites and other environmental problems near their home in Michoacan.  Lourdes Campos's son was killed for being a labor organizer.  These people are not criminals; they did not choose to become involved in shady dealings and wound up dead, as the politicians who avoid addressing the problem would have you think.]

The caravan spent last Sunday and Monday (August 26 and 27) in Houston.  The first stop was St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, where family members of victims and survivors of the “drug war” from both Mexico and the US shared their stories.  I saw a former police officer and current member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) break down in tears expressing regret for the role he played in enforcing drug laws he no longer agrees with.  (We have only 5% of the world’s population in the US, but we claim nearly 25% of the world’s prison population–most of which is made up of non-violent drug offenders and two-thirds of which are people of color, according to The Sentencing Project.)

From there, the Caravan went to the Rothko Chapel where Javier Sicilia, who stopped writing poetry after his son’s murder in March 2024, told his story and recited three poems (in Spanish, which were beyond my grasp of the language).  His speech was followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

“It is the work of a poet to give back meaning to words,” Sicilia said in response to a question regarding artists’ social responsibility.  “We talk and talk, but we’re not saying anything.  We are using the degraded language of politicians and businessmen.  Art allows us recuperate the meaning of things.”

He compared our current moment to the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.

“Our institutions are outdated,” he said.  “They are relics of the 17th century.  This is why we are taking our message straight to the people–like Zapatistas, like participants in the ‘Arab Spring,’ like the Occupy Movement.  We are interested in dialog with people, not with institutions.  The state, the church, the economic institutions–they no longer have the power to change things.”

The next morning, Sicilia joined Baker Institute fellow William Martin, Ph.D. and visiting scholar Tony Payan, Ph.D. for a panel discussion at Rice University [click link for video of the discussion].  The panel explored connections and consequences of this failed policy on both sides of the US/Mexico border:  most of the drugs are consumed on the US side, for example, but the “drug war” has done little to curtail demand for drugs; most of the weapons used in Mexican drug crimes come from the US–the corrupt Mexican military and police (which are often indistinguishable from narco-traffickers) are directly armed by US “foreign aid,” and the drug gangs get their weapons from unscrupulous gun dealers on our side of the border; meanwhile, racialized drug laws and their selective enforcement which allows addicts such as Charlie Sheen and Paris Hilton to walk freely while ruining the lives of poor kids from communities of color provides a huge boon to our private prison industry.

The speakers advocated for a more sensible US drug policy.  Payan advocated for drug decriminalization in concert with community development and education for a long-term vision in reducing drug abuse.  He compared the current drug war to the more sensible efforts to reduce cigarette smoking–in the 1960s, 60% of the US population smoked cigarettes, but a 40-year, multi-generational campaign has reduced that percentage to where only 18% of the population smokes today.

“We’re not using all the tools we have at our disposal,” he said, “We’re using only law enforcement, which is like going to the gym and exercising only one arm.”

Dr. Martin built on Sicilia’s statement that prohibition benefits only gangsters and warlords in his country by drawing a parallel to the USA’s failed experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

“The most dangerous and destructive drug is alcohol,” he said, “but you don’t see Anheuser-Busch and Jack Daniels shooting at each other on street corners.”

From there we went to Talento Bilingue de Houston, where a press conference included speeches by the local head of the NAACP, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and survivors/victims who shared personal testimony–they included Lourdes Campo, whose son Guillermo was killed on June 19, 2024; Olga Reyes, who has lost six members of her family and 20 additional family members have had to flee their homes; Sacario Hernandez, who was jailed for five years and 51 days on false weapons charges; Araceli Magdalena Rodriguez, whose son Luis Angel was murdered; and Margarita Lopez Perez, whose 19-year-old daughter was kidnapped, tortured, raped, and beheaded.  Other survivors, such as Maria Trujillo Herrera, held up signs bearing the names and faces of their lost loved ones.

Then Javier Sicilia sawed a legally-bought (too-easily bought at a local gun show) AK-47 into three pieces as part of a three-part ritual/direct action.  A .357 Magnum pistol, which had been purchased by a caravan member with a foreign accent without anybody even checking her ID at the same gun show in less that five minutes was also destroyed.  [Click here for undercover videos of those gun purchases.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Survivors of the gun violence then ritualistically pounded the guns’ fragments with sledgehammers:

The most moving part of the ceremony was perhaps the burial of the gun fragments in cement.  Remember, most of these survivors never recovered the bodies of their loved-ones–they have “disappeared”–so this is the closest facsimile of a burial for their deceased that these people will probably ever get.

From TBH, the Caravan was supposed to go to a Carter’s Country gun dealership, because two of their four locations are on the list of top-twelve arms dealers who sold weapons that wound up being used in violent crimes in Mexico.  These statistics were compiled by The Washington Post over a year-long investigation, despite the fact that the US Congress passed a law in 2024 that prohibits the ATF from tracking a gun’s point of origination.  As a result, a mere 1% of unscrupulous US gun dealers are selling 57% of the weapons seized at Mexican crime scenes–and many of these parasites have set up shop right at the border.

Unfortunately, as Hurricane Isaac had set its sites on the Caravan’s next stop–New Orleans–organizers felt the need to hurry along.  Survivors did not get their chance to confront the notorious arms dealer Bill Carter with photographs of their slain family members.

REAL QUICK–Another highlight from the Caravan was their stop in Arizona’s Maricopa County for a chance to dialog with their infamous sheriff, Joe Arpaio.  Below is a photograph by journalist and caravan participant, Roberto Lovato of Berkeley, California, showing a demonstration outside of Arpaio’s inhumane “tent-city” jail with a tank parked out front.  Read Lovato’s account of Sicilia’s meeting with Arpaio on the Latino Rebels blog, “‘America’s Toughest Sheriff’ has the softest hands of any lawman in the West.”

According to participants, Arpaio began the meeting by objecting to the presence of an interpreter in the room.

“You’re in America,” he spat at the revered, humble poet Sicilia, the aggrieved father of a slain 24-year-old, “Speak English.”

Yours truly once went undercover as “Uncle Scam” with a contingent of Minute Men when Arpaio visited Houston back in 2024.  Check out this hilarious video and read more about it on our old site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, can you imagine a US social movement led by a poet? I know such a thing is relatively common in other countries, but it is unheard of in the US.  Why are we so anti-intellectual?  (I would argue that even our “political” poets who are working in the “poetry slam” tradition and even our “activist scenes” are anti-intellectual.)

My friend, Houston-based poet/translator/interpreter John Pluecker, whose project Antena donated equipment and interpretation services to the caravan, had the pleasure of interpreting the conversation between Tom Hayden and Javier Sicilia which was just published at The Nation magazine.  I encourage you to check it out–it’s much deeper than the statistics and polling data we’re usually fed by our Fourth Estate.

You can support the caravan by petitioning President Obama by texting “PEACE” to 225568.

For more information on the Caravan and its goals, here is a bevy of links:

Caravan Website

The Nation

Democracy Now!

CNN

San Antonio Current

Los Angeles Times

[Credit for all photos in the article goes to Liana Lopez, except for the photo of Arpaio's tank, which goes to Roberto Lovato.]

]]> http://freepresshouston.com/featured/caravan-for-peace-with-justice-and-dignity-stops-in-houston/feed/ 3 http://freepresshouston.com/featured/dan-sharber/ http://freepresshouston.com/featured/dan-sharber/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2024 11:00:11 +0000 RamonLP4 http://freepresshouston.com/?p=11875

Dan Sharber (Photo John Van)

Most people who know me know that Black Hole Coffee Shop is my FPH office.  The coffee and food is solid, the staff is wonderful, and there are always interesting people hanging around.  One of those interesting people is Dan Sharber – the bearded, tattooed, Marxist activist.  Yes, as a local member of the International Socialist Organization, he’s every hardcore right-winger’s personification of evil. Yet, unlike the manner in which the left is often portrayed in right-wing media, Sharber isn’t someone who mindlessly spouts off ideology.  He has carefully thought through his views, is thoughtful and never arrogant in his responses when challenged, can be critical of the left where he sees it failing, puts his beliefs into action, and, to get away from politics for a second, is just an overall nice guy.  When I heard that he and Laura Taylor were moving to Austin, I thought it would be a good opportunity to capture some of his views while he was still in town.  Here is the transcript of our discussion of which an abbreviated version appears in the August 2024 issue of the FPH.

FPH –  I want to kick off on a good note and talk about what you see working both on the national scene and in the Houston area.

Generally speaking the occupy stuff has been very positive. I am not speaking specifically of this or that action but rather the way in which it has changed the terms of the debate. The concept of the 99% vs. the 1% is a very powerful one and something that politicians have tried to blur or ignore for a long time. Before Occupy, saying anything about the rich and everyone else got you labeled as a class warrior and while there are concerns about where to go from here, just changing the terms of the debate during this severe recession has value.

Locally it is hard to say. I think everything I said about Occupy nationally applies here too but, beyond that, I think the real positives are coming out of some other ongoing organizing. Specifically good jobs/great Houston and the Texas organizing project (top) have been doing some great work recently. Getting more and more people involved from communities of color and other underrepresented groups in the fight for a better and more livable Houston. This excitement has bled over into the fight among Houston janitors for better wages and conditions. These fights by and for the working poor are very important and, while nothing new, it is striking how positively they are being covered locally. The recent op-ed by a local janitor in the Houston Chronicle is an example. Anyone who has lived here very long knows that you can’t rely on particularly friendly coverage from the Chronicle on issues relating to the poor and communities of color in our city.

FPH – I think it’s very easy to see an opposing side as simply evil.  I usually find that there are no purely evil folks out there but people who are driven by convictions that they see as bettering society. Do you agree with that and if so what are some of the root issues you think that have become twisted in the American political narrative, where people find themselves putting a lot of energy into issues that in reality should not be issues or in which they are being manipulated by forces that do not have their best interests in mind?

This is a thorny question. I do agree that there are usually not ‘evil’ people on the other side from you. The problem is that this comes from a liberal world view. The liberal view of the world almost requires the other side to be evil. Otherwise how can you explain a CEO that dumps waste in ponds? Or flaunts safety standards in their mines and end up burying miners? Why would these people do that if they were not evil?  This is a big part of why I am a Marxist. A Marxist understanding of capitalist society illustrates that these individual CEOs and companies are acting completely rationally within a system that privileges profit over everything else and requires continual growth to stay alive and realize that profit. If you or I were a CEO we would act in the same way and it would be perfectly right to do. Working people are not just compelled to compete for work and look after their own self-interests but capitalists are compelled to lower their own cost and realize the profits created and grow grow grow. So I think framing people as evil is silly and lazy. Undoubtedly there are a bunch of assholes occupying high positions throughout our society but that doesn’t cause them to behave the way they do. It only helps them to sleep easier at night.

The next part of your question has more to do with ideology. A commonly quoted phrase from Marx is that the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. I think you see that play out pretty clearly in society in a general way. For example, you see truck drivers who complain about inheritance tax or something similar. People with nothing to pass on who believe this is an important issue in our country. Or the idea that rich people create jobs and thus tax breaks for them are something everyone who cares about employment should support. These are ideology not facts. The same could be said about the debt ceiling debate.

FPH – Let’s get a little more personal.  How would you define your political convictions, what shaped them, and where would you like to see this country go?

Well, as I said I’m a Marxist. I used to be a solid liberal democrat – perhaps a left liberal might be more illustrative. I thought if we just elect the right people things would get better. It never made sense why Dems caved all the time. Likewise, I thought socialism sounded good in theory but that it would never work, that people were too selfish or too self-interested or lazy even to make some truly collective society work. I met someone who made a compelling case to the contrary and I started reading. It became very clear from reading everything from anthropological accounts of pre-class societies to everyday accounts of people in crisis situations that what I believed to be fact was again ideology. There are cases we read about every day of in the papers people working together to accomplish this or that goal or to survive this or that natural disaster (read eyewitness on the ground accounts from the earthquake in Haiti and hurricane Katrina to see what I mean). The point is not that people are free-loving hippies all the time but rather that there is no specific human nature. We have the capacity for behaving collectively in an altruistic manner as well as behaving like an asshole who steals from old people. Neither of these define us. But it is easy to predict how people will behave when compelled to by the economic system we live within. Capitalism as a system encourages people to be self-interested to be looking out for themselves and their family at the expense of others. We compete for jobs in a country that provides no social safety net. We must literally work or starve. This imperative rewards selfishness and corrodes collectivity and community. I want to see a true democracy in this country. By that I mean a democracy where normal people get to make decisions about every aspect of our lives. Why do we give up our rights when we go to work? I want to see the people that do all the working and creating in this country decide what to do with the products of our labor. Clearly rich capitalists are not going to simply give up their control and privileges so this must be struggled for by all the vast majority of working people in this country and the world really. So I am a Marxist and Socialist and/or Communist and a Trotskyist etc and a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). I’ll cop to any of those and can explain them further if anyone asks.

FPH – How would we get there?

Organization. Nothing is predetermined but, as a Marxist, I have faith in ordinary people to at some point stand up and say enough is enough. At some point, the rift between ideology and material reality becomes a gulf too big to ignore. At that point, people begin to ask why there are homeless people in a country full of empty homes. Why are there starving kids in a world that yearly creates 2.5 times the global caloric need of every person on the planet (according to the UN)? Why is there war and ecological devastation? These are not things that you or I asked for. These are things that are part of a system that puts people over profit. At some point individuals are driven to action. All revolutions of the people (as opposed to a small band of guerrillas or what have you) have followed this formula. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a progressive step in human history and has allowed the flowering of all manner of human activity from science to art but it has since worn out its usefulness. Now capitalism is a fetter on the further advancement of human society. We now have the ability to provide a good standard of living for everyone on the planet but not the system under which to do that.

FPH – Let’s address one of the Tea Parties concerns while we’re here on the off chance one of them is reading this.  I think the only legitimate issue that they have brought forward is the simple question of “How do we pay for X?”  The issue of passing on debt to future generations is a legitimate issue and I’d like to hear some kind of response to that concern, what you feel is wrong about their approach, and how you would address it.

This is easy. End the wars and slash the pentagon budget – there’s the money. Further we can tax the rich at the rates we used to under Reagan (though I would prefer to go back to the tax rates of Roosevelt). The pentagon/military budgets do nothing for the common good of the people of this country. Further this debt stuff is a red herring. We needed MORE deficient spending early in this recession to provide real jobs – something akin to the works programs of the 1930’s. That would’ve increased the debt but it would’ve gotten people working again and paying taxes which would then pay down the debt eventually. What you have now is what is being called a jobless recovery. Corporate profits are way up but unemployment is still high. And with tax rates being what they are, that doesn’t help anyone. So the argument becomes “debt is too high” and once you buy into that as the problem, you are half-way to accepting the ’solution’ i.e. austerity – slash working people’s living standards to save our future generations. Belt tightening for working people who didn’t cause this problem and massive bonuses for the people who did. The tea party illustrates a type of right wing populism that is common among the middle class who do not have the advantages of the capitalists above them nor the potential for collective action like the working people below them. It’s a mish-mash of largely individualist solutions and nostalgia for what they perceive to be a ‘kinder gentler’ capitalism at some point in the past. It is similar to the people who gravitate to Ron Paul and believe that capitalism is good but it got all messed up by corporations. This is foolishness and there are loads of books about the birth and early days of capitalism that refutes this whole narrative. It, again, is largely ideology standing in for facts.

FPH – I want to get to my favorite issue put forward by the Occupy Movement and that is the issue of how the country has “Profits are privatized, losses are socialized.”  This is not even a leftist argument; it’s an argument about how capitalism is intended to work.  What do you think drives this policy and how did we get here with zero accountability?

I think it is pretty straightforward as to what drives this policy. The elected officials have just as much of a vested interest in keeping the system afloat as the capitalists and bankers etc. do. So when things go south and it looks like the system is in trouble, industry of whatever stripe will be bailed out. But since that is government money which is raised through taxation, those losses are socialized – i.e. we all paid for them. I think there is nothing new about this policy but it became more straightforward with the rise of neoliberalism coming out of the recessions of the 70’s. Further the financialization of our economy makes money for everyone with the ruling class so there is no reason for it to be stopped. For real change to come (outside of massive and sustained struggles from below) there would need to be a break in the capitalist class. The changes that came out during the depression came only because there was a split and Roosevelt successfully rallied around a group of more Keynesian capitalists and pushed through the new deal reforms that we know of. Most of the rest of the capitalist class still preferred the balanced budget approach to economic policy. This time around there is no push for a return to Keynesian economics at the top and thus the neoliberal consensus still remains to a greater or lesser degree.

FPH – I recently visited the Griffith Observatory in LA and I immediately recognized that this as having a WPA stamp on it and that made me think about the legacy of the WPA and how much our country benefited from those make work projects.  First off what did you think of the WPA and why do you think that model was rejected in favor of funding the private sector.

I thought the WPA was phenomenal. I love it in a real nostalgic sense (there is a poster of the WPA book that is beautiful to flip through) as well as from an economic sense. I am always a fan of putting people back to work. I spoke a little above about works programs overall and I think it was rejected for the same reasons I said on the last question. There was no desire to return to Keynesian economics at the top and thus deficit spending was out from the start and works programs (despite our real and continuing need for infrastructure improvements and jobs) was never really on the table. Though in early 2024 I really thought it might be… I was surprised with the continuation of neoliberalism that we have seen. I really thought Obama was going to be forced (even if it were against the will of some) to move to a more Keynesian model. It didn’t happen and part of it was because the left and labor was too weak and/or in disarray to demand it.

FPH – Let’s talk labor.  How is it that workers from the States can compete with a person working in a plant like Foxcon it would seem that, with global capitalism, purchasing power parity would drive down the wages of the workers in the richer countries as companies move to lower wage countries in order to compete?  How can unions function in a global market place?

You are right. And we are seeing that phenomenon now. When there is another class of worker who can be hyper exploited at a lower rate, it brings down the value of labor everywhere. This has been common throughout history when black workers were pitted against white workers and immigrant workers were pitted against native workers and women workers were pitted against men workers… in all cases the rates of the less exploited group fell rather than the other way around. Part of the reason the gender wage gap is smaller now (though still obscenely big) is partially because men’s wages have dropped not just that women’s wages have risen. Unions though… that is the question. Unions need to be internationalists and the old IWW slogan of an injury to one is an injury to all needs to have real meaning again. I don’t have the space to get into this but the unions are in bad shape and desperately need to be rebuilt. There are some bright spots (the Chicago teachers union is one of them) where union reformers are organizing the rank and file but it is going to be a long row to hoe… supporting the rights of international workers to unionize or otherwise fight against their conditions and exploitation must be part and parcel of that as well.

FPH – Since we are discussing labor let’s discuss immigration.  First off the laws here are pretty whack when it comes to immigration but there never seems to be any proper political response but I see issues on both the left and the right that each side ignores.  ON the left there is the issue of how wages in this country are pulled down by immigrant labor.  A bonded carpenter may fix your roof better than the fellow at the Home Depot but he won’t be able to compete on price.  So that worker sees less work and less money.  The argument that these are jobs US workers don’t want I feel is disingenuous because in some cases it is that they don’t want the job under those conditions or wages.  On the right they see these workers are getting away with murder but these immigrants have it rough and exploited by accepting lower wages, dangerous working conditions, and other things that go with having to work in the margins of this country.  These are all labor related issues and it is very easy for one side to call the other side names but how can we protect US worker wages and raise the working conditions of immigrants where everyone benefits?

First off the bonded guy’s wages are pulled down BECAUSE the other guy is undocumented. He occupies a hyper exploited strata that leads to this dynamic so the problem is not that he is here but rather that he is considered lesser because of his immigration status. Despite how this may get mystified, the bonded carpenter would be much better off fighting for amnesty for the guy at the home depot rather than fighting for his deportation. It is interesting the way you phrase this question because I think you are right in the broad strokes but what is important to ask is who benefits. Who benefits by lowering the wages of working people? Who benefits by having workers unprotected by OSHA much less unions etc.? The answer of course is the ruling class who profit from our labor. This is not some sort of conspiracy theory; it is simple economics that I elaborated on above. The answer again is that these false dichotomies need to be overcome. Working people need to band together and fight for our common interests and not let ourselves be split by language or faux designations like native or immigrant or undocumented or what have you. The history of the working class shows that the only way you ever protect wages and improve conditions it by combining into unions or other solidarity organizations and making demands of the bosses. Unions have been under attack for a long long time and it is imperative that they be rebuilt as soon as possible.

FPH – You posted this on your Facebook today, ‎”When localism substitutes ethical consumption for politics this isn’t an error: it’s an ideological reflection of how the petite bourgeois structure their lives.” would you like to expand on that?

Sure. I’ve been thinking a lot about the middle class and the particular individualist political solutions you often find there. Also I have been thinking about what the problems with these solutions are. I’m reading this book called no local right now (http://www.zero-books.net/books/no-local) that deals with some of these issues but specifically the localist movement where you only buy local and get your food from local sources etc. that is all well and good but when that is elevated to an actual challenge to the system, that is when there are problems. There are too many reasons here to list why going local will not change the world but I encourage people to check out the book if they are interested. It is very specifically a Marxist book so you will learn a lot about other aspects of Marxism that you might not have encountered before. But what this quote clarified for me and why I posted it on my Facebook was that the desire or attraction to localist type solutions is not some sort of bad idea someone just came up with but has a specific social basis in the lived experiences of the middle class (or what Marxists – usually derogatorily – label the petit bourgeois).

FPH – Adam Smith has a pretty simple mechanism for dealing with unscrupulous businesses.  If company X does something bad, the public responds by punishing the business.  Regardless of the owner’s intentions and if he is a good person or a bad person, the cost of those bad actions put him at risk by affecting his livelihood.  That’s not a bad mechanism but today’s capitalism isn’t the same as Smith’s because there is such a disconnect between who own the company, the owners, and the public.  It seems that the Invisible Hand that Smith envisioned is completely absent in today’s market.  People invest in 401ks or mutual funds or what have you and everything is so abstracted that all they worry about is a return on investment and the people running the companies are faceless boards whose only motivation is short term gain.  The stateless nature of companies and their dubious designation as having the rights of people also help to disengage what would be the only inherent control in the system. How have things gotten so bad, why is this allowed to continue, and where do you think this is leading us?

Things have progressed in exactly the way you would expect if you dig into the dynamics of capitalism. The iron law of profit is the single driving principle. That leads to further consolidation and monopolization where fewer companies own more and more and wealth in turn becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. That’s where we are at right now. The income inequality is unsustainable. But as to where it goes, who can say. It depends on what people do about it. Business will continue to drive down living standards in order to reap greater profits which, in turn, will lead to more inequality etc. etc. but if the profits are good then who gives a shit about the misery? But people will fight back and re-unionize and rebuild existing unions and fight for better wages and conditions. After many ups, downs, and setbacks, I am hopeful that we’ll build a better society. One where human need is more important that profits. One where everyone has a home and food and healthcare and a job and free time to enjoy the art and culture and the other truly worthy human creations.

FPH – I have similar issues with Marxism in practice.  While not exclusive in this regard, it seems that in example after example, Marxism has been corrupted into fascist cult of personality states where individual freedom is curtailed under the justification of what betters the collective whole.  I’ve always felt that the issue is simple human nature – when the people own the means of production it seems that eventually a power structure develops where the few control the many and we have a case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Why are there so many examples of these, what do they have in common, what makes Marxism susceptible to this kind of corruption, and how can Marxism escape those types of traps.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. I disagree on attributing things to human nature (as I sort of said on that earlier question). What previous ’socialist’ experiments lacked was an engaged and active working class. The Marxist conception of socialism is that it cannot be delivered to people but must be won by the people. As a Marx says, it is the self-emancipation of the working class. The reason this is important is because everyone has a stake and is active in the process. There are other ideas and checks and balances but I think this argument is a bit of a red herring. The question for you is do you think we can do any better? I think we can. Capitalism has opened up great productive capabilities and created the capacity to abolish all kinds of material want. But now it has led to the poisoning of our environment, the total immiseration of millions of people through financial turmoil, death and destruction daily throughout the world via wars of all kinds. Do we think this is the best of all possible worlds? Isn’t something better worthy and worth fighting for? Sure it will not be easy and there is always a chance of all sorts of bad things happening but does that mean we should accept all the current and future shit out of fear it might be worse? Well it’s pretty damn terrible as it is right now and with the continual polluting of the environment we don’t have much time before something is going to give. And if we continue along the course we’re going now, 90% of species will be wiped out and humans will be living in zones near the poles to get away from flooding and heat as large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. I think we can do better. And I think a socialism based on fundamental rights and a pure and thoroughgoing democracy would not just be a nice society to live in but I believe that it is the only society that will even guarantee our human existence. Or as the polish revolutionary Rose Luxemburg said, it is either socialism or barbarism:

“Out of all this bloody confusion, this yawning abyss, there is no help, no escape, no rescue other than socialism. Only the revolution of the world proletariat can bring order into this chaos, can bring work and bread for all, can end the reciprocal slaughter of the peoples, can restore peace, freedom, true culture to this martyred humanity. Down with the wage system! That is the slogan of the hour! Instead of wage labor and class rule there must be collective labor. The means of production must cease to be the monopoly of a single class; they must become the common property of all. No more exploiters and exploited! Planned production and distribution of the product in the common interest. Abolition not only of the contemporary mode of production, mere exploitation and robbery, but equally of contemporary commerce, mere fraud.

In place of the employers and their wage slaves, free working comrades! Labor as nobody’s torture, because everybody’s duty! A human and honorable life for all who do their social duty. Hunger no longer the curse of labor, but the scourge of idleness!

Only in such a society are national hatred and servitude uprooted. Only when such a society has become reality will the earth no more be stained by murder. Only then can it be said: This war was the last.

In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity. The words of the Communist Manifesto flare like a fiery menetekel above the crumbling bastions of capitalist society:

Socialism or barbarism!”

FPH – OK, Bar fight between Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Slim Thug.  Who would win and what is the lesson we can draw from this?

I really have no idea but would love to have overheard the conversation that lead up to that fight. I suspect that there would be more drinking and hugging than fighting among this group…

The trial of three members of the Russian punk band, Pussy Riot, has begun. The three women, Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, were arrested in early March on charges of“hooliganism” and have been in jail ever since.  And as if five months behind bars for staging an impromptu performance in a cathedral isn’t bad enough, they are facing up to seven years in prison if found guilty.

Pussy Riot is a feminist punk band from Russia that has been causing ‘trouble’ for almost a year now.  Five of the ten members staged a performance on the altar at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February, a few weeks before March’s presidential elections were set to begin. They rushed the altar dressed in their signature brightly colored dresses and balaclava masks and sang a song directed at the Virgin Mary. The song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!” which has since become known as a punk prayer, called on the mother of God to save Russia from Valdamir Putin and Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian church. Kirill has been very outspoken, calling the performance blasphemy and requesting the toughest punishment be applied to all three women. The performance which consisted of singing, praying and dancing lasted less than a minute before three of the five women were apprehended.

This trial is highly political, especially for Putin, and and many Russian citizens feel as though an example is being made of the women in an attempt to squash any future plans of protesting Putin, the Kremlin or the church. In opening remarks at the trial, a statement written by one of the members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, stated that they may have committed an “ethical error” and apologized to anyone who was offended by their performance. However, the apology was followed by a statement that labeled the Russian government anything but pleasant,  ”We, like many of our compatriots, find unpleasant the insidiousness, deceit, venality, hypocrisy, acquisitiveness and lawlessness with which our current leadership and authorities are sinning… .” And according to the prosecution the three women are agents of Satan and are just a fraction of the massive uprising plotting to destroy Russia.

Amnesty International has come to the aid of the women behind bars and are actively campaigning to have them released. However, just last week, the Moscow City Court ruled that the women will serve at least another six months behind bars for the current charges against them. Supporters of Pussy Riot are not the only ones who have been outspoken about the harsh punishment being inflicted on the women. Many community members, including some Orthodox believers, have publicly stated that the punishment does not fit the crime.

Turns out, supporters of Pussy Riot are growing worldwide and here in Houston you too can come out and show your support. A demonstration has been planned for  Thursday, August 9^th from 5pm-7pm outside of the Consulate General of Russia located at 1333 West Loop S. (#1300), Houston, TX. Attendees are being asked to create some sort of colorful art and/or posters to help demonstrate support of Pussy Riot.  Additionally, supporters interested in attending this peaceful protest are also being asked to  adorn themselves with their most vibrant pair of stockings, dresses and balaclavas. Men, feel free to use this as the excuse you have been waiting for to borrow one of your girlfriends dresses .

For more info check out the ‘Houston Loves Pussy Riot’  Facebook event page.

This is the fourth FPH Librotraficante road report.  For background, check out my previous articles: Books Are A Gateway Drug, Remember the Alamo, Revenge of the Nerds and Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso.  This picks up where the last post left off.

Following a late night at the hotel bar with painter Cesar Martinez, photographer Diana Molina, and bloggers Michael Sedano of La Bloga and Jesus Trevino of Latinopia, we are off again.  Leaving El Paso, we are treated to a view of the border wall.

The Rio Grande/Rio Bravo is little more than a dry stone gully here; Mexico is close enough to touch—you have to be careful lest your cell phone jump to a signal from one of their towers and you get slammed not just with roaming charges but international rates to boot!

This is the easiest traveling day, and we’re only on the road for about an hour before we roll into Mesilla, NM, where poet/playwright/novelist Denise Chavez welcomes us into her little book store for a breakfast feast.

The bookstore, which is has been home to Chavez’s Border Book Festival for 17 years, is housed in what used to be a grocery store that was built by a German immigrant named Mr. Fritz in the 1840s.  I grab a quick bite and go wandering around the quaint little town of about 2,000 which has a rich history—it was the former capital of Arizona/New Mexico and is the site of Billy the Kid’s demise.

Dagoberto Gilb, Denise Chavez, and El Librotraficante Tony Diaz seated before members of the caravan.

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Having eaten, taken the obligatory photographs, dropped off banned books for the “underground library” at Ms. Chavez’s bookstore, we set off for Albuquerque, where the godfather of Chicano fiction, Rudolfo Anaya himself was going to bless our caravan and it’s payload of mind-altering prose.

Anaya meets us at the driveway and escorts us into his humble home perched on a hill overlooking the city.  Inside, we take a shot of tequila and feast on pozole, a pre-Columbian corn and meat stew.

Anaya is a gracious, generous host as we spread out over his home looking for outlets to plug in our waning cell phones.  He holds court at his kitchen table and signs books amid peals of laughter from all about.  One of the organizers from Nuestra Palabra, Laura Razo, is sad to have forgotten her first copy of Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima at home, which still bears a stain from the tear she shed during a particularly sad moment in the book, but she is happy to have a signed new copy, nonetheless.

Librotraficante Rebelene (Zelene Sulchit, a once-undocumented immigrant, former Houstonian, and former Nuestra Palabra student who is currently an immigrant rights advocate in New York City) asks if Anaya will take a photo with her and he says of course, then suggests she sit in his lap for the best composition.

We leave Anaya’s sated and happy and make our way to Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center, which is huge, I mean HUGE.  There, a line-up of fine local authors joins with our caravan for another Banned Book Bash with a standing-room-only audience of 500+ that not only rocks the house, but also raises thousands of dollars for books and libraries.

Since I announced in my second post that I would be playing up cross-cultural intersections, I’m happy to say that the Albuquerque Banned Book Bash featured the most diverse cast of readers on stage.

I’ll start with Mary Oishi’s “Rules of White Supremacy.”  Oishi was raised by overt white supremacists (think KKK) in Appalachia, yet her mother was a Japanese “war bride.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

San Francisco’s Cathy Arrellano read her hilarious poem about gentrification: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

followed by her “End of an Affair,” a break-up poem to the United States: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Local Albuquerque poet Andrea Serrano read her “Lament” for Arizona: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

and Librotraficante Poncho Flopez (a young college student named Adam Lopez from Illinois) read his “Food Desert in the Desert,” which features some brilliant turns of phrase.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Local teacher Bill Nevins, who identifies as Irish-American, opened with a St. Patrick’s Day greeting before reading his prose piece about getting fired after the poetry slam team that he sponsored ruffled some feathers by performing anti-war poems.  I regret that we don’t have video of that, but here is a trailer for the film on that episode in his life: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here is award-winning slam poet Hakim Bellamy: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Afterwards, before the dance party, I am happy to talk to Bill Nevins about one of my favorite plays, “Translations,” by the Irish playwright Brian Friel.  “Translations” provides a great analogy for what’s going down in Arizona right now—it’s about British colonialism in Ireland during the mid-19^th century, when British soldiers and mapmakers were Anglicizing the Emerald Isle by renaming the towns and villages and hills and streams.  They were literally colonizing the Irish mind by erasing history/memory (which is attached to specific places) and forcing the locals not just to learn a new language but to detach place-names from the stories behind them.  Since we think in words, our language has the power to broaden or limit what we can even potentially conceive of.  This was followed by music and ass-shaking, which, of course, transcends words.

Big ups to Liana Lopez for sharing her photos in this and previous posts, and also, of course, to the High Tech Aztec, Bryan Parras, for most of the above videos.  Check out his YouTube Channel for more Librotraficante stuff in the coming weeks and months.

This is the third Free Press Houston Librotraficante embedded road report. For background, check out my previous articles: Books Are A Gateway Drug, Remember the Alamo, and Revenge of the Nerds. This picks up where the last post left off.

Forget your iPads and your Kindles, books are making a comeback!  Have you seen this sexy new video from B*tches in Bookshops, yet?

Photo by Paolo Mossetti

Click here to view the embedded video.

By now you must have heard about Arizona’s ignorant ban on ethnic studies.  It’s a cynical ploy to win votes by opportunistic politicians who are banning classes they have not even checked in on, despite invitations from teachers and students.  Aside from coverage in the Houston Chronicle, the New York Times [1] and [2], the Los Angeles Times, the Texas Observer, The Nation, Alternet, and Newsweek; even the Daily Show has chimed in with a report this week.

The bus leaves San Antonio early and it doesn’t take long before the landscape begins to change.  We are leaving the Hill Country and entering the Chihuahuan Desert.  Ground cover dissipates.  Hills become crags.

We listen to classic civil rights speeches by James Baldwin from the Pacifica Radio Archives over the bus PA.  True to form, Baldwin is measured, passionate, and inspiring.  With elders like this, having fought and endured what they went through, how is that we are still fighting this fight?  It baffles the mind.

Following Baldwin we are treated to a showing of the documentary film Precious Knowledge, which is about the very issue we are traveling to Arizona to fight–their general ban on ethnic studies which all but explicitly targets Tucson High School’s Mexican American Studies program.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The film features moving testimony from students, teachers, and parents.  It’s easy to see why opportunistic white supremacist politicians might be intimidated by this program which instills knowledge of self and self-respect in these students.  With that “precious knowledge,” they can achieve anything.  They’re not as liable to be bullied into thinking they’re losers who are only good for jail or minimum wage.

“In America,” the Horatio Alger, lift-yourself-by-the-bootstraps-types want to tell us, “anybody can achieve anything.”

That may certainly be true…to some extent.  At the very least it is debatable–but can’t we all also, 100%, unequivocally agree with the old saying, “You cannot achieve what you cannot conceive?”

In the US, we look with distaste on the British system of education because it channels students into either a university track or vocational track early on, but here in the US, Congressman Raul Grijalva says in the film, second-grade children-of-color data is used to project the size of future prisons.

We are taken inside classrooms where teachers like José Gonzalez teach students humanistic concepts like the four Tezcatlipocas:

“Tezcatlipoca is critical reflection,” he explains to his class. “Any time something happens to you, you have to ask yourself ‘How am I at fault?’ Only through reflection and reconciliation:  forgiveness.  If you hate your dad, you are hating yourself, but by forgiving your father, who else do you forgive?  Yourself!  And now you become whole. Now we can create positive change…From there, you have this precious knowledge.  What do you need to do?  Take action.  Positive action.”

If it is indeed “personal responsibility” that these Republican politicians want students to learn in school, then they should be supporting this program, not banning it.  And it doesn’t just benefit Latin@ student, either.  Dig this testimonial by Erin Cain-Hodge, an Anglo-American graduate of Tucson High’s Mexican American Studies program and current undergraduate at the University of Arizona who says that her high school classes challenged her even more than her current college courses are doing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The film is interrupted for some good news, though.   Caravanista Lupe Mendez, aka Librotraficante Lips, has received good news–he’s been accepted into a creative writing MFA program!  And not just that, the school had tried to contact him the day before but we were out of cell phone range, so they checked his Facebook page and learned all about the Librotraficante Caravan and his role in it, which prompted them to reconvene their committee and offer him a scholarship!

The whole bus is elated for our fellow traveler.  (Lupe will get two more such phone calls during the week–and I’m not sure how many more acceptances he’s received since returning home.)

The movie resumes and one of the politicians–Tom Horne–uses the words of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech to argue against ethnic studies.  He is arguing for a “color-blind” ideology, which is its own form of racism.  Another claims to be frightened by “militaristic” images of Brown Berets in brown shirts, bandanas, and sunglasses–“clearly revolutionary costumes”–which could easily pass for Eagle Scout uniforms., and you want to ask her if she’s ever seen the militarism suggested by marching bands and color guards–complete with “rifle” twirling and all!

I could go on and on about the film but you should just watch it on your own.  Maybe I’ll include more quotes in subsequent posts.  Back to the bus.

We arrive at our hotel around dusk in El Paso, and have a short while to rest and get ready before the night’s event at Mercado Mayapan in El Paso’s historic Chinatown, which dates back to–wait for it–the 1880s!  Is that not “American” history?  Would it be “subversive” and “seditious” to examine the relationships between the diverse communities which lived on this land, then?

Mercado Mayapan, our venue for the evening, has its own interesting origin.  Before NAFTA, it had been a 40,000 sq ft factory, but after NAFTA sent the jobs across the border, the women who worked there were left with few options.  So they organized and eventually founded this space where they provide job training, sell their handmade wares and food, and put on cultural events like ours.  A crowd of over 400 people packs the main space for the night’s literary show, which includes a sultry performance by El Paso’s La RaNa:

Click here to view the embedded video.

and Ben Saenz:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Afterward, I meet a man named Amit K. Ghosh–a Bengali-American writer and publisher of the literary magazine Border Senses, which was one of the evening’s co-sponsors.  And there you have it–a Sikh-American writer meeting a Bengali-American writer in a reclaimed Chicana space in El Paso, Texas’s historic Chinatown.  Is this the “real” America, or is that bleached and whitewashed mythical fairyland that Sarah Palin likes to allude to?

That said, I leave you with another one of my tweets from the caravan:

THE STATE THAT BROUGHT US THE “UNIVERSITY” OF PHOENIX IS TRYNA TEACH US ABOUT EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS #librotraficante abcnews.go.com/blogs/headline…

— SuperbHerb (@SuperbHerb) March 16, 2024

A mix of about 70 students, academics, and activists braved stormy weather yesterday to attend Dr. Norman Finkelstein’s talk entitled “How to Solve the Israeli Palestinian Conflict,” organized by the Rice Progressives at Rice University. Before the talk even started, my friend David turned to me and whispered (in reference to a handful of apparently Muslim–or possibly dark-skinned Amish– young men), “I’ve never seen so many chin-strap beards in one place in my life.”

Photo by Jo Fax

Not to fear–there was a sprinkling of yarmulkes and hijabs, too.  (Speaking of which, WHY DO MUSLIMS AND AMISH HATE MOUSTACHES???)

The talk was not without its controversy, but most of it went down before the fact in cyberspace–in back-and-forth bickering on the Rice Progressives’ Facebook page, in particular.  Organizers claim that their posts promoting the talk were repeatedly removed from local progressive radio station KPFT’s FB page within one hour of posting them, and posters promoting the event were repeatedly torn down on the Rice Campus–which is allegedly rare for Rice.  One Rice Alumnus forwarded a Huffington Post article by Finkelstein’s nemesis, Alan Dershowitz, comparing  Finkelstein to Holocaust deniers such as David Duke and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, to the Rice Public Relations Department.

So, based on all this, attendees might have expected some degree of tension or drama.  Nobody was surprised to see a Rice police officer on hand to keep a handle on the protestors and counter-protestors that organizers expected.  Nothing even close to that went down.  Instead, Finkelstein’s strategy seemed to be to lull both supporters and critics alike into slumber by repeatedly stating the obvious in his monotonous delivery.  His answer to Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian homes was to create a roomful of dozing people.

He opened his talk by stating that, “In 200 years–if human civilization survives that long–people will look back in befuddlement on how this conflict involving a handful of people in a veritable pinprick on the map went on for so long.”

He’s right.  What a stupid conflict–yet its effects reverberate across the globe.

“It can be solved, easily,” he continued, “by presenting a reasonable and just solution that the public can get behind.”

Thanks, Captain Obvious–nothing gets past you, does it?

Due to changes in four areas, Finkelstein believes, that solution may be imminent:  1) Changes in the region (i.e. Turkey’s shift from unequivocal support of Israeli policy to a more nuanced approach, as well as the Arab Spring which has brought regime change to another of Israel’s neighbors and most fervent allies, Egypt); 2) changes in world opinion, such as the recent vote at the United Nations expressing support for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations; 3) shifts in US public opinion, despite the news media’s clear uncritical support for Israeli policy and clear bias against Palestinian viewpoints; and 4) shifts even in the Jewish subset of US public.

This last observation was probably the most interesting rhetorical strategy employed by Finkelstein.  By presenting as a given that American Jews–being among the most “liberal and idealistic”–no longer want to defend Israel’s most aggressive actions, he completely deflates his critics.

“You’re young, you’re idealistic, you’re Jewish…you don’t want to defend that.”

While allies such as Turkey and Egypt and American Jews may not attack or criticize Israel for aggressive actions such as the 2024 assault on Gaza dubbed “Operation Cast Lead,” they are increasingly falling silent.  In the absence of their vocal support, Israeli aggression will begin to look more like what it is–something comparable to the current political repression in Syria.

So what is the solution?  Though prominent Israeli politician and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni says, “I am a lawyer but I do not support the law,” international law is clear.  On the issues of borders, East Jerusalem, and the illegality of Jewish settlements beyond the 1967 borders, the International Court of Justice’s 15 judges are unanimous–Israel in violation of international law.  Though the ICOJ has not ruled on the remaining “Final Status” issue–that of 1947 refugees’ “Right to Return”–Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are unequivocal:  refugees have a right to return or to just compensation for lost property.

The question of refugees’ “Right to Return” came up again during the Q&A session, and Finkelstein dealt with it deftly.  He said he believes that we do not yet have the formula for that solution–that will emerge from negotiations–but there are two necessary preconditions before even entering negotiations.  First, Israel must recognize the terrorist atrocities–dubbed the Nakba by Palestinians–committed to expel the native Arab population in 1947, and after recognizing and admitting that the Nakba did indeed occur, Israel must apologize for official and unofficial terrorism committed in its name.  Only then can both sides meet as equals to conduct negotiations addressing repatriation or reparations.

So, Finkelstein says, the solution is simple–we must enforce international law, which seems both reasonable and just–something the public can get behind, but that’s easier said than done.  When presented with this JUST and REASONABLE solution, amended to include a land-swap that would allow 62% of the Jewish settlers to remain where they are (100% are illegal according to international law), Livni said, “It makes sense, but no Israeli prime minister can support this and survive, politically.”

Quoting Gandhi, he says that the problem is not the public’s ignorance–the majority of people in Israel, Palestine, the US, and even the US Jewish population agree with the findings under international law.  The challenge is not to change people’s minds, but to move people to ACT on what they KNOW is correct.  So it’s up to us, Finkelstein says, to apply the pressure that forces the Israeli leadership’s hand to enforce what we all agree is right.  How we should apply that pressure, he never really said.  (He is not a supporter of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions campaign.)

Of course,  Gandhi had his own “problematic” attitudes toward Christian, Muslim, and Sikh minorities in India, not to mention blacks in South Africa, but that’s a different story…or is it?

Picking up where I left off in my last post, still in San Antonio, the caravan heads to the Gallista Art Gallery, where we are served up a delicious vegetarian meal by two Caucasian Hari Krishna men–one of whom speaks with a European accent.  That’s right, we stop at a Chicano art gallery to eat Indian food served by Europeans: multicultural America at its best!

And here is a disclaimer: I will continue to refer to people’s race and ethnicity as I write on this topic because that’s what this is about–multiculturalism, which (to me) means honoring and celebrating our different histories and contributions to the culture of the United States and the world. This is probably a good place to post one of my first tweets from the caravan:

MULTICULTURALISM IS THE NEXT STEP IN HUMAN EVOLUTION // OH WAIT YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN THAT EITHER #librotraficante

— SuperbHerb (@SuperbHerb) March 14, 2024

On the other side of this are the one-way assimilationists–opportunistic politicians like Arizona’s Russell Pearce, John Huppenthal, and Tom Horne–those who quote MLK and claim to be “colorblind” but whose real agenda is to use a fabricated, infantile version of history to beat the rest of us into submission, to give up our own rich heritage–not to mention what we know to be the truth–in favor of  their “superior,” bleached and sanitized United States of Everything is Hunky-Dory (and Always Has Been), Next!

Next stop after the Gallista Gallery is the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center where a standing-room-only crowd of 350+ greets the evening’s entertainment–more banned authors.  The ever-quotable Tony Diaz kicks things off by saying, “When Arizona tried to erase our history, we decided to make more, ” then reads this quote from banned book Message to Aztlan: The Selected Writings of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez:

“If you would repeat some of the words of the Declaration [of Independence] to [the average American citizen who watches Archie Bunker, who is getting fat in front of the TV drinking Coors], they’ll think that it’s radical, they’ll say it’s communist, they’ll say it’s socialist, and they’ll say it’s un-American.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch this video of Sandra Cisneros reading from her banned book, The House on Mango Street.  It’s a sweet little vignette about a group of little girls who go for a walk around the barrio in their mothers’ fancy shoes.  How frightening!

Next update–on to El Paso’s historical Chinatown for more sexy, “subversive” literature!  In the meantime, enjoy another one of my tweets:

THE ONLY GOOD LAWS IN ARIZONA ARE THEIR CHOLAS #librotraficante

— SuperbHerb (@SuperbHerb) March 16, 2024

Oh! And dig this–Revenge of the Nerds was filmed in Tucson!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The kicker came when Jane began to receive bills from Memorial Hermann for the rape kit they had administered, bills which totaled $1,670.

By Amanda Hart

Just in time for Women’s History Month, the Houston Police Department has released its burgeoning untested rape kit log—6,663 kits to be exact, with some kits reaching back as far as the 1980’s. When I first heard this number I thought surely it was inaccurate, that I was actually just watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU, not a local news channel. Such an outrageous number left me with nothing but stunned questions.
Questions like: What the fuck HPD? How the hell did you end up with a back log of 6,600 untested rape kits? The excuses that were to follow were as vomit inducing as the numbers themselves. On February 16th, at a monthly HPD press conference, Assistant Chief Matt Slinkard explained, “There are many reasons why sexual assault kits may be untested in police property rooms; for example, as the chief has mentioned before, possibly a suspect pled guilty during the course of an investigation prior to any testing being done. Possibly there was an issue of consent, meaning the sexual assault kits are possibly no longer probative in the investigation. There might have been a situation during the investigation where the district attorney rejected charges. And also, once a kit is screened in the first phase of testing, which we call presumptive screening, many kits—about 40%– will show that there is no biological material to go on for DNA extraction and amplification. So that would end at that phase, and no DNA testing would be done. Now within that population of 6,663 untested sexual assault kits are there possibly open and active investigations in there that need to have a closer look so we can go forward and make sure we are creating a priority list to make sure those are being tested and done if need be? Absolutely.” So let me understand: While it is “possible” that some untested rape kits equate to the police not doing their jobs, Assistant Chief Slinkard makes it sound as if they do not constitute the bulk of the backlog. Anybody else notice the odious smell wafting off that statement?
Next, I figured out how much money was spent to complete this most recent audit of untested rape kits sitting in storage—a whopping $178,000 out of the nearly million dollars awarded Houston by The Department of Justice to audit, sort and create future plans to keep the numbers from getting out of hand again. Does anyone else see an issue with that? I tell you what, I will save us taxpayers the left- over $800,000 and clear this whole matter up right now. If a rape kit contains useable DNA and the alleged crime has not reached the statute of limitations, then test the fucking kit. Tada! Now we have $800,000 to begin testing rape kits. I understand that all institutional procedures in our society involve some level of bureaucratic madness, but wasting money to figure out how many untested rape kits are stored in the City of Houston should not be part of it—especially if almost $200,000 had already funded an incomplete audit that failed to classify the untested rape kits. That amount of money should have been sufficient to not only count the number of untested kits but also to determine in which column they should be recorded to avoid speculation regarding the need for further testing of the kits.
The most disheartening piece of this puzzle is the story of a woman who dealt personally with the HPD. She happened to contact me to share her deeply personal account of an assault that began with her attacker but which was exacerbated by the HPD. The woman, whom we will call Jane for the sake of anonymity, went to the HPD after being raped only to spend many months following her report emotionally and monetarily harassed at the hands of the detective assigned to her case. Not only did the detective working her case behave unprofessionally, but in the end Jane was forced to pay for her own rape kit.
Jane explained that she arrived at the special crimes unit 36 hours after her attack and was told that she needed to go directly to Memorial Hermann or Ben Taub for her rape kit. She was reassured that either hospital’s financial costs would be covered by the state and the city. She explained to HPD that she did not have insurance, and they reaffirmed that she would incur no cost if she went to one of the city-run hospitals. So she immediately went to Memorial Hermann and endured the invasive process of evidence collection. She left the hospital that night like most women do after their clothes have been taken from them for evidence—in a hospital robe. The next few weeks turned into a terrible game of phone tag with the detective assigned to her case, Investigator Ruben Zermeno, who from the beginning was unprofessional, to say the least. He began their repeated conversations by telling Jane that she really should have gone to the police sooner than 36 hours after her attack, that her case was really not looking good since she had waited so long to come in. I am not sure what HPD sex crimes training handbook says but I am almost positive that is not in the manuscript. That would be something that a district attorney might explain before trial, not the detective on the case.
Over a month after Jane was attacked she was walking down Mckinney Street after a job interview when a car pulled up next to her and its window went down to reveal Detective Zermeno, who announced right there, at a very busy public intersection, “Hey, sorry I’ve missed your calls, but I just wanted to tell you that he (the attacker) agreed to come in for questioning.” Jane looked around mortified and said, “Okay.” When the light turned green, Zermeno said goodbye and drove away. No matter how heavy Zermeno’s caseload, it is unacceptable for him to stop and speak openly to a victim walking down the street about her rape.
The District Attorney refused to take on Jane’s case against her rapist, and the charges were dropped. No one notified Jane of this occurrence; she was informed only after she had inquired about it herself. She was told that she could go to the police station to pick up her clothes from the rape kit. When she went to get them, however, some key items were missing. She was given a sweater, pants and the piece of paper that she had undressed on in the hospital (WTF, why would you give her the paper she undressed on?). Her bra and underwear were not with her rape kit. This begs the obvious question: Where the fuck were they?
The kicker came when Jane began to receive bills from Memorial Hermann for the rape kit they had administered, bills which totaled $1,670. She ignored the first few bills, thinking that maybe they had been sent to her by accident and that surely the bills must also have been sent to the city or the state and that the charges would work themselves out. However, when Jane soon began receiving final notices and threats of collection agency action, she realized that someone had decided she was responsible for paying for her own rape kit—a rape kit that was neither examined nor considered for use by HPD—a rape kit that was missing her bra and underwear. Jane ignored the bills. Detective Zermeno had proven he was of no help; she felt a wall between them against which she was helpless. It was not until Jane attempted to purchase a used car that she was alerted of the medical debt on her credit record—a horrible reminder of the traumatic rape from which she was just beginning to emotionally recover. Jane contacted the collection agency and was told that they could offer her a discounted price of half the original charge, but she had to pay it that day. So she divided the $835 between two cards and took the hit in an attempt to make this awful ordeal go away once and for all.
I know HPD wants us to believe that this back-logged rape kit fiasco is really not tied to them not properly doing their jobs, but accounts like Jane’s are not doing much for their argument. And while I also sympathize with and respect sex crime detectives who are properly doing their jobs and are doing the best they can with a broken system, Detective Ruben Zermeno is not one of those officers. I also urge anyone else who has experienced anything like the above story to file a complaint with HPD. I know that after being victimized by the system to which you went for help you understandably might give up and do what Jane was forced to do. But many HPD detectives and officers perform their jobs properly, and the only way unprofessional behavior will change is if citizens make injustices known. We have to protect each other, and reporting abuse is one of the only weapons we have. So let’s use it.

*Author’s note. I contacted the sex crimes unit in an attempt to get some answers not only about the untested rape kits but the unprofessional behavior exhibited by detective Zermeno. I was given some numbers to call, and I am still waiting on a call back.
Moreover, if reporting any abuse to HPD is terrifying or would regress the progress you have made in dealing with your assault, you have other options, other places where you can report the abuse, including the Women’s Center on Waugh and the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Houston. I am currently working with Jane in an attempt to get the money back that she paid for her kit and with reporting the disgusting professional neglect by detective Zermeno. If in the end you do not feel comfortable reporting an assault, I understand and think that you should do what is best for your well being. Just know that people are here for you if you need us.

Librotraficante caravan to smuggle banned “wet-books” back into occupied Arizona this spring break, leaving networks of Underground Libraries in its wake.

By Harbeer ‘Superb Herb’ Sandhu

WHO[MEVER] CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE

WHO[MEVER] CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST

- George Orwell, 1984

On January 10, 2024, employees of the Tucson Unified School District entered classrooms, snatched books by Latin@- and Native-American authors from students’ hands, boxed them up, and sequestered them in a storage facility.  Copies of the books are still available in school libraries, officials say, but teachers are prohibited from including these voices in their curricula, so they are effectively banned from the classroom.

This indignity–this act of cultural theft and de facto censorship–was too much for Houston author, educator, and founder of the literary non-profit Nuestra Palabra, Tony Diaz to bear, so Diaz coined the term “Librotraficante” (i.e. “book smuggler”) and organized a caravan from Houston to Tucson to raise awareness about the issue.  Perhaps more importantly, the caravan will rally a network of local activists along the way. The idea has caught fire, and Diaz, along with Liana Lopez and Bryan Parras of Nuestra Palabra, met with hundreds of Latin@ authors, academics, and student activists from across the country just last weekend at a conference in New York City.  Arizona’s actions have awakened a sleeping giant.

The caravan will leave Houston on March 12 and stop in San Antonio, El Paso, Mesilla (New Mexico), and Albuquerque before arriving in Tucson on March 16. At each of these stops, local libraries and community centers will host readings and “banned” book giveaways, and many of the “banned” authors will participate, including Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alberto Urrea, Dagoberto Gilb, and Rudolfo Anaya, among many others.

I think I might join the caravan, myself, but first, a little background.  My name is Harbeer Sandhu and I am a proponent of hyphen-American literature.

Two years ago, the Arizona legislature passed House Bill 2281, which prohibits schools from offering courses or classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”  That sounds pretty reasonable, but I am here to tell anybody who alleges that “ethnic studies” and “ethnic literature” promotes societal fragmentation has got it all wrong, and their plan is going to backfire.  Respecting our diverse backgrounds brings people together–it promotes inclusiveness through mutual respect–whereas consigning our dearest, most respected authors to collect dust in a warehouse in favor of an infantilizing, sanitized version of history does much more to promote ethnic/racial/class resentment than any boring, coming-of-age story about grandma’s mangoes.

YEAH GEORGE WASHINGTON OWNED SLAVES, CHILDREN, BUT SO WHAT HE CHOPPED DOWN CHERRY TREES AND DIDN’T LIE ABOUT IT–ISN’T THAT AWESOME???

Tony Diaz says he was in college before he ever read a book by a Chicano author.  It was Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, and it changed his life. He has met scores of hyphen-American who had that same experience of that same book.  I can’t speak to Diaz’s experience, but I can tell you about my own.

I was in college before I learned the meaning of the word “Eucharist.” I’ve always been a heavy reader, but my family is Sikh, so I only ever went to a Christian church a few times when I was growing up, and the ones I ended up at tended to refer to the sacrament as “communion,” in the vernacular, rather than the Latin “Eucharist.” So I didn’t know what “eucharist” meant, along with a lot of other stuff that white Christian authors routinely referred to in their writings.  Shrug.  That comes with the turf–“minorities” deal with this kind of stuff all the time.  (And in my own fiction, I sometimes use Punjabi words without always defining them.  I try to give my reader enough context clues, but sometimes I feel like it’s OK if they don’t understand every word–and if they really want to know, they can look it up and learn about my culture in the same way that I learned stuff that is irrelevant to me, like “Eucharist.”  That’s called mutual respect.)

So I read all kinds of boring crap that had nothing to do with “my” culture in high school–The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, The Awakening, The Scarlet Letter, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights…I mean, the list could go on and on. Oh, sure, it wasn’t just all long-dead white authors that we read–there was some African American stuff like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry thrown in there, but it wouldn’t be until I got to college that I got turned on to “ethnic” fiction in a way that really hit home.

I was an English major at New York University in the late 1990s, and my two most favorite classes were “American Fiction Since WWII,” taught by Professor Philip Brian Harper, and “The Literature of India,” by Professor Wendy Fairey. Dr. Harper is a gay black man most famous for his book about gay black masculinity, and Dr. Fairey is a Jewish woman from Brooklyn whose course covered English-language (i.e. not translated) literature by South Asian authors both in the Subcontinent and the diaspora–imagine a Jewish woman from Brooklyn teaching a classroom full of South Asian kids about “their own” literature–it was beautiful–and it also included a few British authors like E.M. Forester, George Orwell, and Rudyard Kipling who were born in India or had spent time there.  That’s how culture works, but more on that, later.

In Harper’s class, we read many of the books and authors who are now on Arizona’s de facto banned books list–Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, James Baldwin.  We also read books like John Okada’s No-No Boy, Philip Roth’s Jewish coming-of-age Portnoy’s Complaint, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Rudulfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and too many other novels to list here.  Many of them dealt with some of the same issues I had dealt with growing up with one foot in two cultures–stuff like not fully fitting in anywhere–not among Indians and not in the dominant white-American culture, either. And the more I learned about other ethnicities and the history of race-relations in the United States, the more I realized that I was not some isolated freak but the exact opposite was true–EVERYBODY goes through this. So, for example, John Okada’s novel about a young Japanese-American man who was interned by his own country during World War II did not make me feel more *excluded* from America, it showed me that there are other Americans who have felt the same way–that I was not alone, and my country may not be perfect but at least we can openly talk about this stuff so we can make it better in the long run.

BORDERS LANGUAGE CULTURE

I have a neighbor, a “white” woman married to a Chicano Republican, who has a bumper sticker on her car that reads, “BORDERS LANGUAGE CULTURE.” Turns out this is one of right-wing talk radio jerk Michael Savage’s catch phrases. One of these days I’m going to make a sticker that reads “are fluid and porous” to append to her bumper sticker.  I want to tell her that her word for her night clothes–pajamas–is an Indian word. I want to tell her that I AM THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH, and even the word “juggernaut” comes to English via India. How’s that for your purity of language, idiot? Oh, and she’s an elementary school teacher.

What we are seeing here, in my opinion, is the last gasp (I hope) of white supremacy.  By 2024, according to the US Census, there will no longer be a single ethnic/racial majority in the United States–we will all be minorities. This is leading to a cultural shift–led by advertisers, mostly–where you’re going to see a lot more shit like the Cosby show and Asian reporters like Tricia Takanawa.  This is freaking a lot of old white folks out.  Why? I’m not sure.

Back when I was a professor, I used to teach an essay called “Models of Ethnic American Relations,” by George M. Fredrickson.  Fredrickson describes four different models of race relations, which he calls, Ethnic Hierarchy, One-Way Assimilation, Cultural Pluralism, and Group Separatism.  Ethnic Hierarchy is what we consider traditional racism–one group is superior, another group is inferior, other groups are somewhere in between, and nothing can be done to change this.  Nobody in the contemporary openly espouses Ethnic Hierarchy any more–not publicly, at least.  The second model he examines is One-Way Assimilation–in this model, one culture is held up as superior, but people of other cultures can “rise up” to that level of superiority if only they abandon their own culture in favor of the dominant culture–that is what the patriarchs of Arizona want all us brown people to do–to abandon pride in our own history and accomplishments, including our contributions to America’s greatness–in favor of some watered down soupy white bread cockamamie bullshit. They feel threatened by what Fredrickson calls Cultural Pluralism but is more commonly called “multiculturalism”–the idea that culture is fluid, that human beings have been exchanging ideas and practices since the dawn of human beings, that we have much to learn from one another, and that as long as we’re not doing fucked up shit that infringes on the rights of others (like female circumcision or tossing widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) we ought to afford each other a minimum of respect. (Group Separatism, the fourth model, is where we all splinter into our own ethnic ghettoes, like turning the southwest US over to Latin@s, the Pacific Northwest to rednecks, the South to African Americans, etc.  Nobody except the most extreme racists take that idea seriously.)

To kick off these lessons, I would put a few lists on the board of things like horses, tomatoes, potatoes, Taco Bell, hamburgers, hot dogs, rock and roll, hip hop, apple pie and ask them to associate these things with particular cultures. The Mexican students would immediately put Taco Bell in the “American” category, but they didn’t always get that “hamburgers” come from Hamburg and “frankfurters” allegedly come from Frankfurt. Since we would have recently have read a story by Sherman Alexie, they might be inclined to associate horses with Native Americans, but then I would tell them that there were no horses in the “New World” until Spaniards brought them over–and that the Spaniards, in turn, got horses from the Arabs.  Rock and roll is “white” music, right?  Maybe…but it comes out of the blues, which goes back to African-American slave culture, which then reaches back to Africa–and guitars have their roots in Arabia, too.  And hip hop? Well, OK, it was invented by black people in the Bronx, but they were sampling stuff like the Kinks and Aerosmith and playing it on turntables and mixers made in Japan.  And can you think of Italian food without tomatoes or Irish people without potatoes–both come from the “New World”–potatoes and tomatoes have been in Europe for a relatively short blink of the eye in human history.

Anyway, a fellow Free Press-er recently posted on Facebook that he hates Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.  I haven’t read the book, but I have a feeling I might hate it, too. I’m inclined to believe that it’s a little dated–it’s from an earlier generation of hyphen-American literature, which I believe we’re past.  My analog to this would be stuff like Chitra Divakurani’s Arranged Marriage or The Mistress of Spices, which exoticize Indian culture, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction, which is about boring characters who are constantly gazing at their navels and wondering if they are Indian or if they are American.  I haven’t read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, but that another familiar example of what I’m talking about here.

I think we’re past all that.  I favor polyphonic fiction which features a cast of characters from diverse backgrounds–getting into trouble together and celebrating their differences but not dwelling on them in a boring, exotic, fetishizing way.  I think the Brits have a head start on this–Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, which features British-Indian punk rock kids and queers and anti-capitalists really changed my world, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth brings together a hilarious cast of colorful characters ranging background from Brittain to Jamaica to Bangladesh.

Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, which tells the story of an integrated platoon in the South Pacific during World War II did that in 1948.  Most recently, New Jersey’s own Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wove together stories about a Chinese man living in the Dominican Republic, a Dominican kid growing up as a comic book nerd in New Jersey, and his nerdy Indian sidekick.

This is all to say that I felt *more* alienated and *less* American until I found this literature. This literature taught me many things, one of which is that there are many ways to be an American.  Borders language culture my ass. In the words of the great American songwriter Woody Guthrie, you fascists are bound to lose.