Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Congressman Greg Casar + Border Policy
Border policy, and Latin America
Congressman Greg Casar ( D. Texas) once a DSA member.
Progressive Democrats visit Latin America . seek solutions to border conflict.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/8/30/progressive_codel_latin_america_greg_casar
Chile. The coup. Latin America.
Texas border actions.
Friday, August 25, 2023
The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement
The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (Review)
rowing up in the 1990s, I always marveled at the story of how my parents met on their way to a United Farm Workers (UFW) picket line. As former members of the UFW, my parents often shared nostalgic memories of their times standing outside grocery stores asking consumers to join a UFW boycott, traveling to Sacramento to appeal to state lawmakers, and participating in union gatherings and celebrations. My mother’s recollections of César Chávez, who led the UFW until his untimely death in 1993, were of a charismatic man filled with contagious optimism. Although the UFW held few contracts in the 1990s, my parents always spoke with pride about this union that began in Delano, California, in 1965 and achieved unimaginable feats like living wages, health benefits, a pension plan, an end to pesticide spraying while workers were in the fields, and freedom from sexual harassment.
These are the kinds of memories and perspectives that I found in the pages of The Strikers of Coachella. Focused on California’s Coachella Valley, Christian O. Paiz offers us a remarkable analysis of the UFW movement that centers the union’s grassroots and eschews unnecessary binaries of union victory or defeat. The work is a welcome change from the recent emphasis on the UFW’s failed leadership. If the book is nearly four hundred pages long, that is because Paiz skillfully captures the nuance of this history—foregrounding how Coachella’s strikers viewed the movement through a place-based politicization shaped by multiple ideological and social currents.
One of the major themes that resurfaces in this book again and again is the matter of contingency. The UFW movement, Paiz painstakingly reminds us, had “multiple beginnings and endings,” and was shaped by “overlaid trajectories and shifting visions.” He develops the framework of a “field of stories” to describe how people intersected and shaped each other’s lives as they assessed the possibilities of a better tomorrow and (re)created a movement to turn possibility into reality. The author refutes the argument that the UFW’s famous leader César Chávez was largely responsible for the union’s inability to maintain the labor contracts that it achieved in the 1970s and early 1980s, let alone expand to more regions. Recent labor histories have demonstrated the extraordinary measures that capital—with the help of the state—adopted in the 1970s and ‘80s to dismantle unions and foreclose collective action.
More than a history of the UFW Movement, the book is also a history of the larger Chicanx movement in the Coachella Valley covering nearly four-decades between 1945 and 1983. Many of the region’s young Chicana/os first became involved in activism supporting the UFW cause and subsequently focused their energies on other issues like education and public health. Although most members of the Coachella Valley’s Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) emphasized their U.S. citizenship, spoke English, and some belonged to a small middle class, they endorsed the UFW’s first strike, raised funds in support of the striking workers, condemned the local media for misrepresenting farm labor conditions, and organized other pro-UFW actions.
Without losing sight of the larger political economy that conditioned the UFW and Chicano movements, Paiz utilizes his formulation of a field of stories to explain how historical actors came together in struggle. He injects life into this history by weaving together the different—yet intersecting—lives of movement participants. The author’s voice takes on an almost poetic quality when he writes about the farmworkers who sustained the UFW movement. People, Paiz writes, “built the very movement that built them. They did so in the context of past and present UFW victories inside and outside the Coachella Valley. … Each farmworker thus moved in a shared space that, in turn, moved with them—contingently and unpredictably, almost magically.” Like the UFW movement, the Coachella Valley’s Chicano movement is one of multiple beginning and endings, set forth by a multiplicity of peoples with intersecting trajectories.
Some of the main reasons behind the union’s decline, Paiz shows through UFW member testimony, include a growing political conservatism, employers’ anti-labor practices, and Mexico’s economic downturn in the 1980s. Just as the union’s contract wins never carried with them a full political economic transformation nor reflected a strong and efficient organization, the UFW’s apparent defeats nonetheless empowered farmworkers to imagine radical possibilities. The Coachella Grape Strike of 1973 is a perfect example of this. To avoid renewing their 1970 labor contracts with the UFW, Coachella Valley grape growers invited the Teamsters union to create a fabricated jurisdictional dispute with the UFW in 1973. Coachella’s UFW members found themselves the targets of grower and Teamster violence and abandoned by a national media that repeated false narratives in the name of objectivity. Despite the very real problems that the union’s 1973 defeat posed to the Coachella Valley’s farmworker movement, Paiz argues, the strike “is best seen as producing spaces for community- and self-definition, spaces grappling with past marginality and envisioning future paths.” Union losses, like wins, are never complete nor guaranteed.
The fissures that existed among ethnic Mexicans and between Filipinxs and ethnic Mexicans, Paiz shows, made the UFW movement all the more extraordinary. While the Coachella Valley’s Mexican American community often demanded the rights that citizenship accorded them, immigrant Mexicans sustained political visions rooted in a Mexican national history of proletarian struggle. Filipinxs nearing retirement age viewed with frustration and disappointment how the union took a stronger Mexican identity with each passing year as agribusiness continued employing Mexican migrants as strikebreakers. I was relieved to see that Paiz thoughtfully addresses the complicated reality that agribusiness continuously employed Mexican migrants as strikebreakers. “We do not need to engage in xenophobic depictions of immigrants to note that many could not readily join UFW strikes or join unions for fear of strikes, because of their juridical vulnerability and/or commitments to families and communities in Mexico,” Paiz rightfully argues.
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Support Farm Workers and Their Union
With your help NY farm workers can win their UFW contracts
We recently won five union elections in New York state, representing 500 new workers on four apple orchards and a major vegetable producer in upstate NY. Now we're fighting back against grower intimidation to get the workers the union they voted for. We are also organizing at many other locations as workers want contracts and the protections that come with them. The need is strong. Workers are tired of being abused and taken advantage of. Here are their stories: Erik is a cabbage worker in Albion NY. He shares an illegal practice where he works: "I have to purchase my own equipment needed to work such as boots, coats, hats and gloves and spend approximately $200 for this equipment. This is money that my family needs and I know it's not right … I am hoping the union can change this practice. I know that if we're united we can win." A 23-year resident of New York, Tomasa also wants the protection of a union at her apple packing house. She shares her story about what sounds like regular exposure to carbon monoxide. "Sometimes, in the mornings when the machinery comes in to move the product, the gasses from this equipment make me dizzy, give me a headache, and once made me sleepy: it is a kind of gas that a truck emits. We have to go outside to refresh ourselves from the fumes." Santos has been picking and thinning apples in Albion NY for 8 years under the H-2A program. He shares how the farm supervisor tells long standing workers that he wants to get rid of them and replace them with his family members. "When he checks the apples we pick, he deliberately bruises the ones that we pick; but with his family members, he gives their apples only one glance and doesn't even check the quality...I want the UFW to protect me so I can continue doing my job." This new organizing drive was made possible by a recent New York law – the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act – which protects farm workers' rights to unionize and prohibits grower retaliation against those organizing. Workers want to take advantage of the new law that has opened doors for them to speak up and organize. A campaign of this sort is expensive and so are our legal fees. Please donate to help NY workers get the rights and union protections they deserve.
PS: After you take action you can also share this campaign on Facebook & Twitter. |
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Hope in Guatemala
The anti-corruption candidate’s stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country. Arévalo is the son of Juan Jose Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, who held office from 1945 to 1951.
 | The anti-corruption candidate's stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country. But only if he is allowed to take power—and to exercise it. |
Bernardo Arévalo’s Unexpected Victory Brings Guatemala Another Democratic Spring
The anti-corruption candidate’s stunning upset could mark a new and hopeful era for the country. But only if he is allowed to take power—and to exercise it.
Daniel Judt, August 23, 2023
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala—On Sunday night, in the central plaza of Xela, the second-largest city in Guatemala, a crowd of several hundred gathers to watch the results of the country’s presidential election. When the press calls the vote for Bernardo Arévalo, a university professor turned anti-corruption politician, the crowd erupts. ¡Viva Arévalo! Viva Guatemala! Fireworks go off. A young campaign volunteer runs up to the podium, takes the microphone, and cries, “Today is the beginning of Guatemala’s next Democratic Spring!”
It is a reference to Arévalo’s party, Movimiento Semilla, whose language is full of seasonal metaphors. (“Semilla” is Spanish for seed). It is also a nod to the party’s birth during the “Guatemalan Spring” of 2015, when citizens took to the streets to oust President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti for corruption (both are now in prison). Most meaningfully, though, it is an invocation of the decade of social democracy that Guatemala witnessed from 1944 to 1954. That period, commonly known as the “Democratic Spring,” has remained an ironic point of light in Guatemalan historical memory—an era that gave way to a US-backed coup, a decades-long campaign of genocide during which the state murdered some 200,000 indigenous Guatemalans, and, most recently, a series of “democratic” governments marred by corruption, poverty, and political repression.
Now, with Arévalo’s victory, the phrase “Democratic Spring” has transformed from nostalgia for a distant past to hope for a near future. The comparison is personal. Bernardo Arévalo is the son of Juan Jose Arévalo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, who held office from 1945 to 1951. The invocation of Arévalo Sr. is a political strategy. Many still remember him as one of the country’s two best presidents, along with his successor, Jacobo Arbenz. But it is also an instructive reminder of what it will take for the current Arévalo to lead Guatemala toward—or back to—a genuine form of democracy.
It is something of a miracle that Arévalo even made it to the final round of voting. In February, before the first round, the country’s electoral commission used spurious accusations to bar three candidates from participating. Two were wealthy businessmen running popular campaigns. The third, Thelma Cabrera, was a Mayan Indigenous rights activist whose party, the left-wing Movement for the Liberation of the People (MLP), had performed unexpectedly well in 2019. It seems likely that Arévalo snuck through on the strength of his dismal support. Most polls had him in last place.
Arévalo, 64, is impeccably calm and soft-spoken. His lack of bombast, together with his party’s emaciated infrastructure—Semilla did not accept the bribes and gifts that sustain Guatemala’s leading parties—helped him stay under the radar. They also helped him garner support. Semilla’s party proposals are nothing if not rigorously sensible: lower the cost of electricity and food by breaking up monopolies; bring workers into the formal economy, which would lower the skyrocketing rate of immigration to the US; clean up government agencies, by following a detailed ten-step plan. Over and over on the campaign trail, Arévalo reiterated this last commitment. His words were vague (“together, as a people, we will fight against corruption”). But coupled with his honest style and clean background, they earned him a valuable epithet: the “anti-corruption” candidate.
In the first round election on June 25, Arévalo received 12 percent of the vote, enough to put him in second behind Sandra Torres, a former first lady with no meaningful ideology beyond a commitment to gaining power. (Torres had run for president twice before, in 2015 and 2019, and lost both times.) Or, really, Torres finished second, Arévalo third, behind some 1.2 million blank or spoiled ballots. Even as Arévalo’s victory is fêted, it should not be forgotten that the real winner of the first round was a simple, resounding no.
Stunned by Semilla’s advance to the second round, the current government scrambled to disqualify Arévalo. The supreme court investigated “fraud” in the vote count. The attorney general tried to dissolve Semilla on the grounds that the party had falsified voters’ signatures. The police raided Semilla’s headquarters in Guatemala City. But the attacks backfired.They reinforced Arévalo’s image as an anti-establishment candidate and carried his name out into rural areas that Semilla’s campaign, largely a social-media operation, would not have otherwise reached. Despite the fact that Torres and her UNE party used all sorts of illegal tactics on election day—busing voters to polling sites, handing out food supplies in exchange for votes, instructing her election monitors to challenge Semilla ballots—Arévalo won the second round by over a million votes. In Xela, a few Semilla poll monitors told me that their UNE counterparts accepted Torres’s money and then cast their ballots for Arévalo.
Juan Jose Arévalo took office in 1945, in the wake of a revolution that toppled the country’s military dictatorship. It was a tenuous popular front of communists and anti-communists, leftists and centrists, momentarily united to fight for democracy. Arévalo was the ideal candidate. A left-liberal philosophy professor of a Deweyan cast, he advocated the overcoming of “old class hatreds” with a flighty platform of “spiritual socialism.” Eloquent in speech and manner, upper-class but never a part of dictatorial circles, anti-communist but with vague leftist sympathies, he was, as one historian writes, “all things to all people.”
Arévalo senior had significant blind spots. He never pursued land reform and did little for rural education. But he did pass a labor code that established the right to unionize, capped the workweek at 48 hours, and instituted health and safety standards for all laborers. (A Nationcontributor wrote that the law made the US’s Wagner Act look like “sheer fascist reaction.”) He also created a robust social security system, the IGSS, which is still active today. Crucially, he tolerated and benefited from a coalition of left-wing parties without which the most impactful elements of “Arevalismo” would not have survived. The communist-leaning Party of Revolutionary Action, for example, played a critical role in executing Arévalo’s policies—and beating back several coup attempts against him. Fitfully but genuinely, as historian Greg Grandin has argued, Arévalo cultivated a union of “socialized democracy and democratized socialism.”
Like his father, Bernardo Arévalo’s greatest strength, for now, is that he is all things to all people. This is evident even within the Semilla office in Xela. Rene, a recent college graduate who joined the party in May, eagerly affirms that Semilla is “not socialist” and labels the party as both progressive and centrist. Her colleague Guillermo, a serious politico in his late 20s, speaks of Arévalo as a Guatemalan Salvador Allende who will begin to “transition” the country out of “unsustainable capitalism.” In Xela and its environs, I heard socialists and centrists and evangelical Christians say they would vote for Semilla. Ex-guerrillas are happy he won; so is the US government. “Semilla is a party of an elite class,” Percy Aguilar, a former mayoral candidate in Xela for the left-wing MLP party, told me. “A radical left would try to transform the state. Semilla doesn’t want to transform the state. They want to keep the state we currently have, only without corruption.” He voted for Arévalo anyway.
It is still not a given that Arévalo will take power in January of next year. At the time of writing, Torres has not recognized his victory. There are rumblings from the attorney general’s office about another prosecution of Semilla. The speeches by congressmen at the celebratory gathering in Xela’s central plaza are tinged with worries and warnings. Stay alert, the message goes, and be ready to protest.
Even if the transition does go smoothly, it is likely that Arévalo will be limited to working through executive power and administrative appointments. Semilla has just 23 representatives in the 160-seat national congress, and the prospects of a center-left coalition are slim. The intense repression of leftist, Indigenous parties has seen to that. “Whoever wins,” Aguilar told me last week, “the political left will continue to disappear in Guatemala.”
If Arévalo and his movement are to have any hope of upending Guatemalan politics for the long run—of creating a new Democratic Spring—they must reverse this trend. Cleaning up government ministries and strengthening social services are essential goals. But a move from corrupt capitalism to upstanding capitalism will not root out the troubles of a country at the sharp end of global power. Semilla’s promise of a renewed democracy will remain unfulfilled without the cultivation of a strong anti-capitalist left. If the invocation of the first Democratic Spring in Guatemala carries any counsel for Bernardo Arévalo, his party, and the blander forms of liberal anti-authoritarianism now in vogue around the world, perhaps it is this.
Daniel Judt is a graduate student worker at Yale, where he studies American political economy and labor history.
Monday, August 21, 2023
Choosing Democracy: The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Becoming Pre...
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Youth Leadership Opportunity
LNESC ‘s Washington Youth Leadership Seminar Application Available Now!The LNESC National Office is excited to announce that application for the 26th Annual Washington Youth Leadership Seminar (WLYS) is now open exclusively for qualified high school juniors and seniors! The Washington Youth Leadership Seminar is an annual event that hosts 50+ high school juniors and seniors from across the United States and Puerto Rico. The seminar's goal is to nurture emerging Latino leaders and encourage participants to reflect upon and deploy the skills and lessons learned within their own communities.
During the Washington Youth Leadership Seminar participants are not only immersed in cultivating their personal leadership skills but are also empowered to translate these learnings into actions within their respective communities. This unparalleled opportunity paves the way for attendees to engage directly with influential figures, which include members of the presidential administration, esteemed Congressional leaders, leaders from Corporate America, and influential voices from both public and private sectors.
The enriching experiences will catalyze inspiration in students for their professional and academic journeys.
This year's transformative Washington Youth Leadership Seminar is taking place from October 4 - 8, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
Program Highlights:
1. Tailored Workshops: Cultivate leadership attributes, understand the essence of advocacy, explore diverse career paths, and advance professional skills.
2. Exclusive Forum: Engage in dialogues with esteemed leaders in government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors.
3. Continuous Development: Your growth is our priority. Progress will be gauged using a pre- and post-seminar survey, ensuring that students have sustainable benefit from the seminars. Additionally, we track academic trajectories through the National Student Clearinghouse to monitor college retention and completion rates.
Eligibility Criteria:
• Must be a high school junior or senior
• Must be sponsored by an LNESC Center or a LULAC Council
• Must demonstrate leadership and be actively involved in extracurricular activities
• Must submit a copy of a high school transcript
• Must complete the online application by 6 pm ET on Friday, September 8. Incomplete applications will not be considered.
For more information and to apply, please visit this link here.
Friday, August 11, 2023
Candidate Assassinated in Ecuador
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Mexico : Union Leader Jailed
Mexico: Global campaign to free jailed union leader kicks off
Last week I wrote to you about the jailing of Víctor Licona Cervantes, a Mexican trade union leader. As of this morning, 4,475 of you have send off messages and the campaign has been translated into 13languages. It's a good start, but it's not enough. We need to do more.
If you have not yet sent off your message of solidarity, please read on and sign up to support the campaign today.
If you have sent off a message -- thanks! Now, please share this message with your friends, family and fellow trade unionists.
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Víctor Licona Cervantes is a Mexican trade union leader who was arrested five weeks ago on his way to speak at a union meeting.
Víctor is the general secretary of a public sector union in Hidalgo State and his arrest is part of an ongoing fight between the union and State authorities.
The union reports "constant provocations and disrepect for trade union freedom" from the authorities.
Víctor's union, together with Public Services International (PSI) and the Confederation of Municipal Workers of the Americas (CONTRAM), is demanding that Víctor be freed.
Please take a moment to show your solidarity by sending a message of protest to the State government of Hidalgo:
And please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.
Thank you!
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Eric Lee