Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
We are a people without borders.
– Slogan of the Chicano-Mexicano People
The U.S.-Mexico border is a place that changes peoples minds and lives. It is a place where we can, in many ways, see our future and where the future we anticipated is daily called into question.
The United States empire made its way across the continent of North America, using enslaved Africans and indentured Europeans for its labor, committing mass slaughter of the Native American population, and dispossessing the Mexican people of the northwest half of their country.
At the end of World War II, a number of Department of Defense and National Security Council documents elaborated on the shift in geopolitical strategy which the United States empire was taking. Now our job, according to their thinking, was to secure, worldwide, our privileged access to a disproportionate amount of the raw materials of the world and the wealth that accompanied that access and the power needed to guarantee that access into the indefinite future: a U.S. notion of “world security.” Equally important was the thwarting of the powerful aspirations toward a better, more expansive, more autonomous way of life among the masses of the world’s common folk, lest these aspirations disturb our new model of security.
The thinking in these documents was the basis of what we have come to call, inappropriately, the Cold War. While couched in the language of good versus evil and of freedom versus tyranny, it was in effect a new stage in the U.S. imperial design, one in which the hopes of the people of the “South,” Third World peoples, people of color, the working people of the world, would not be allowed to be raised by the “bad example” of peoples and nations not conforming to the dominant world order. The record shows how well we fought our battles.
The “Cold War” era is now over, the right side, we are to understand, having won. A new geopolitical shift is underway, and there is “new” thinking about how we will end up on top again.
Shortly after he took office in 1988 by virtue of an election that defrauded his opponent of the presidency, Carlos Salinas de Gortari travelled to Western Europe in search of investors interested in Mexico. He soon found out that Western Europe was turning to the new nations of Eastern Europe –nations rapidly sliding into a Third World posture of their own– as areas for investment, development, and exploitation. It was in the context of this reality –a world dividing into vast “trading blocks”– that President Salinas turned his eyes northward to the United States of George Bush.
“Sin Fronteras”
“Land and Liberty” was a rallying cry of the Mexican Revolution. One of the reforms of the revolution was the breaking up of the large land-holdings and the establishment of the ejidos, plots of land that were to be held in common and farmed collectively and to which any Mexican family without home and without land could come to claim a place. Since the Salinas administration came to power, government credit to small, indebted farmers has been restricted; in addition, a law was passed making it legal, for the first time, for families to sell their small holdings.
The Salinas government has effectively halted, and reversed, land redistribution in Mexico. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the opponent of Salinas in the last election, describes it as the surrender of the Mexican Revolution to the transnational corporations, many of which are beginning to become cross-border partners in “joint ventures” on the lands once reserved for the landless Mexican. With the privatization of these collective lands and the increasing number of failing small producers, some families stay on the ejidos to work for hire the land that used to be theirs. Many more join the migration to the border to work in the maquiladoras, the assembly plants of the “free trade zone,” and to do farmwork in the U.S.
All of this was explained to me very quietly and very patiently by Carlos Marentes, Director of the Sin Fronteras Organizing Project, a ten-year-old organizing effort by the farmworkers of El Paso and southern New Mexico themselves to struggle for better wages, health and safety regulations, and other basic needs, such as safe means of transportation to and from the fields and a mandatory workers compensation law in New Mexico.
He also explained to me that, while the farmworkers gather many different crops, the majority are employed as chile pickers. In 1991, just in the State of New Mexico, chile production alone was worth $59.2 million. Farmworkers harvested almost 30,000 acres of chiles. The average annual earnings of a farmworker were $5300. Farmworkers pick a five-gallon bucket full to brimming with chiles and, in return, receive a token worth 45 cents. On a jar of “Old El Paso” salsa worth $1.65, only five cents represents the labor of the picker. “Old El Paso” is a subsidiary of the transnational Pet Foods.
Homeless Farmworkers
Many of the farmworkers who work in southern New Mexico live in El Paso. They make daily, round-trip rides of up to five hours to and from the fields, and when they return to El Paso, many of them are homeless, sleeping on the streets of El Paso or in the gymnasium of the Sacred Heart Church in south El Paso. The gymnasium shelter is organized and monitored by the farmworkers and is open from 7:00 PM to 5:00 AM daily. Most of the farmworkers sleeping there arise at 2:00 AM to go to the labor recruitment site a couple of blocks away where labor contractors come to pick up the farmworkers and transport them to the fields. The recruitment site has been the location of many early-morning assemblies and protests by the farmworkers in their struggles with the growers and with government. The farmworkers union, after long negotiations with the City of El Paso, has just obtained ground and financing for the construction of a permanent Farmworkers Community Center, which will be a cultural center, as well as including a clinic and shelter. It will be within sight, almost within touch, of the fence which marks the border and separates El Paso from Juarez.
In the past ten years the situation of farmworkers has not improved. Their real wages have dropped, as have those of the maquiladora workers across the border in Juarez. Yet a good worker can earn more in the chile fileds in two days than in a week in one of the assembly plants. Working hard during the harvesting seasons and saving well, a farmworker may be able to live all year. But during the busy times, they often live in colonies with their children beneath interstate overpasses near the fields.
There is no childcare. So children end up working beside their parents, helping them, if they are able, being exposed to the same pesticides and the same dangers from agricultural machinery. Child labor laws are not enforced, and the lives of farmworkers would be made nearly impossible, if they were. In June of last year, three-year-old Lorena Llamas-Guerrero was struck and killed by a car while bringing onion bags from across the road to her family.
At the end of our conversation, Carlos Marentes summed up one theme of our talk. The “leaders” have failed to point out root causes, he said. So, the real leadership is to be found among quiet, patient grass-roots workers who everyday contest the right of powerful interests to define the direction to be taken by the next geopolitical shift.
Hospitality to the Undocumented
Ruben Garcia was born and raised in El Paso. When he finished school and returned to El Paso, the first maquiladora had just arrived in Juarez, Mexico.
A little over 25 years later, there are an estimated 235 “maquilas” in the El Paso-Juarez area, employing 280,000 people. El Paso and Juarez, which were both about the same size at one time, now have populations of 600,000 and 1.8 million, respectively.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, there are now 2000 maquilas, with over a half a million employees. Seventy percent of the workers are young, rural women, who are considered the ideal, tractable workforce members. They are subject to sexual harassment, exposed to conditions which are damaging to the reproductive system; and, in the Brownsville, Texas, area, have given birth in epidemic numbers to children without developed brains. For an official work week of about 48 hours, they receive, under the best conditions, $30 to $40 per week. This is an hourly wage of $0.63 to $0.83. Real wages in the maquilas have fallen over 50% since 1982.
Ciudad Juarez is a city of unpaved roads. Half of the city is without a sewer system. Ruben Garcia took me on a visit to the squatter community of Rancho Anapra, a community which has appeared on the edge of Juarez. There are endless small houses and tar-paper and plywood shacks. There is no sewer system. Water is captured in industrial barrels which have come home from the plants, where they stored various chemicals. The electric service to the homes is supplied by brave souls who climb the poles and manage to wrap a supply wire around a live line, bring it down to a peg below, and run it along the ground to the house in need. At the intersections of some electrical lines, there are spider webs of such supply wires, pirating electricity.
This is a neighborhood created spontaneously out of the migration to the border to work in the maquilas. It was not here a few years ago. Ruben tells me that families with 3 to 5 working members in maquilas can make it here.
His ministry is hospitality to the undocumented. Annunciation House, on the El Paso side, and Casa del Peregrino in Ciudad Juarez provide shelter to Guatemalans, Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Peruvians, and others. There is a continuing, steady stream of refugees seeking asylum. Casa Vides, also on the El Paso side, is a third shelter, and one to which families and individuals move as they await determination of their requests for political asylum. When full, the three houses contain anywhere from 140 to 200 men, women, and children. Everyday, 450 to 600 meals are served. The houses are staffed by “small communities of volunteers who make personal commitments to live and work in one of the houses for at least one year.” Annunciation House, despite its work with a group of homeless people on the border for which little support is provided, “does almost no fund raising, depending instead on the spontaneous gifts and generosity of those who feel the spirit within leading them to embrace the work and people of Annunciation House.”
The Annunciation House community is now building a house in Rancho Anapra, the squatter community. It will be a place for volunteers to come to and to live, rendering no particular service to the people of the neighborhood. Instead, they will be there to learn to listen and to release themselves from the urge to “do” something, in the face of desperate poverty and hardship.
People Without Borders
Since returning to the Delaware-Maryland area, I have been asked, after describing my visit, why I am hopeful. I am hopeful, as I am honored, to know of the existence of people like Carlos Marentes and Ruben Garcia, and many others, who stand against –and speak truth in the face of– the great geopolitical shifts which seem to go heedlessly on. I am hopeful because, in the face of all that is wrong on the border, there are people, many of whom we would not blame for feeling crushed beneath the weight of what they bear, who carry the seeds of a new way and a truly new world order within them, an order built from below. I am hopeful because I see these people bearing hope, and I know that they are our leaders. I am hopeful because I know that if they are hopeful, I have no right to be discouraged. I am hopeful because I believe that part of the future that is being revealed to us on the border is that we must all become people without borders.
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