LETTER FROM MEXICO #3
Oaxacans Want the Right to Not Migrate
By David Bacon
The Progressive, web edition
OAXACA DE JUAREZ, MEXICO (10/20/14) -- For six weeks
hundreds of teachers in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca have been living in
tents, in the capital city's main plaza, the zocalo. Bonifacio Garcia, one of the protestors,
declares, "We will stay here until the state Chamber of Deputies agrees
that our education reform will move forward in all our schools."
Teachers planton in the Zocalo, or main plaza, in Oaxaca.
Each week teachers from one of Oaxaca's regions take a
turn at sleeping in the tents. This is
the week for the schools on the coast, including the communities of people
whose ancestors were slaves. Garcia
comes from Santiago Tapextla, near Pinotepa Nacional, where most people trace
part of their ancestry back to Africa.
On the coast, family trees are very mixed. Most also reveal other ancestors among the
indigenous people who were here long before the Spanish conquerors arrived. "Spaniards brought slaves with them from
the Caribbean and Africa," Garcia explains. "After Mexico outlawed
slavery in 1821 we became an autonomous community. But in Mexico African people aren't
considered an original people, the way indigenous people are. We're still not really recognized, so we have
to fight for our rights."
Garcia is principal of a "telesecondaria" -- a
secondary school in a remote area where part of the instruction is given
through a national televised curriculum.
While he uses that TV program, he and his fellow teachers reject most of
the other reforms Mexico's national government has attempted to impose. Oaxacan teachers and their union, Section 22
of the National Union of Education Workers, say the Federal education reforms
rely too heavily on standardized testing, and punish teachers for the low
scores of their students.
Teachers Bonifacio Garcia and Gabriel Vielma Monjaroz talk with another teacher in their encampment in the main plaza of Oaxaca.
Instead, Section 22 formulated its own education reform
plan five years ago, the Program to Transform Education in Oaxaca (PTEO). It seeks to develop an intensely cooperative
relationship between teachers, students, parents and the surrounding community.
Lulu, a young preschool teacher from Huatulco, further south along the coast,
says, "I have a much closer relationship now to the parents of my children
than we did before."
For Garcia, the central purpose of PTEO is to help
students get a better education, especially those in rural areas who speak
pre-Hispanic languages like Mixteco, Zapoteco or Triqui -- Oaxacans speak 23
indigenous tongues. But education, he
believes, should also provide an alternative to the out-migration that is
devastating small farming communities.
"I know the cost of migration very well, " he
says. "I lived for four years in
Elgin, Illinois, working for an organization there that helped immigrants
understand their rights. So I know how
hard life can be in the north. Migration
also hollows out our communities here.
If we want young people to stay, we have to have an alternative that is
attractive to them. That starts with
education. That's why our program to
change the schools is so important, and why we're willing to sit here in the
zocalo until the government agrees."
A group of preschool teachers from the coast in the teachers' planton.
Oaxaca has about 3.5 million people, who began leaving
the state because of intense rural poverty in the 1970s. At first people migrated to work on the
industrial farms of northern Mexico. But
then indigenous Oaxacan towns, dependent on growing corn and other agricultural
products, were hit hard by the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 1990, before the agreement was
implemented, about 527,000 people had already left. A decade later that number had mushroomed to
663,000.
Beginning in the 1980s, Oaxacan migrants began crossing
the border, first into California, and then dispersing into states all over the
U.S. By 2008 about 12.5 million Mexican
migrants were living north of the border (up from 4.6 million in 1990) -- 9.4%
of the population of Mexico. But even in
this huge wave, Oaxacans have been over-represented -- 19% of its people are
migrants.
Rufino DomÆnguez, who heads the Oaxacan Institute for
Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000 indigenous people
from Oaxaca in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone. One result has been an explosion of Oaxacan culture
in exile. Currently, at least 16
Guelaguetzas (the annual festival that showcases the elaborate dances of
Oaxaca's many regions) take place, not just in California (where there are 11),
but also in Seattle WA, Poughkeepsie NY, Salem OR, Odessa TX, and Atlantic City
NJ.
Two teachers in their encampment in the
main plaza of Oaxaca. Their banner says, "In these times, it is more
dangerous to be a student than to be a criminal," which refers to the
murder of students at the teachers' training college in Ayotzinapa.
Beautiful dances, however, are performed by communities
that live on the economic margin. Rick
Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study, says surveys reveal
that among California╒s
indigenous Mexican farm workers (about 120,000 people) a third earn minimum
wage, while a third are paid illegal wages below that. ╥The
U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing,
newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working conditions at the
entry level in the farm labor market,╙
he elaborates.
California has a farm labor force of about 700,000
workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up
a majority. Indigenous people
constituted 7% of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before NAFTA. In
2006-8, they made up 29%╤four
times more. The rock-bottom wages paid
to this most recent wave of migrants sets the wage floor for all the other
workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor costs of California growers
low, and their profits high.
It was no surprise, therefore, that anger over
discrimination, displacement, migration and poverty ran through many
denunciations heard last week in Oaxaca at the triennial assembly of the
Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB). "We are not people who were 'discovered'
by the Spaniards, the Americans or anyone else," thundered Romualdo Juan
Gutierrez Cortez, FIOB's new binational coordinator. "We are people in struggle!"
The newly elected binational coordinator
of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), Romualdo
Juan Gutierrez Cortez.
Gutierrez is a teacher with a long political history in
Oaxaca. He was elected a decade ago to
the state Chamber of Deputies, and after his term ended, was jailed in reprisal
by the governor from Mexico's old ruling party, the Party of the
Institutionalized Revolution. When a
teachers' strike spiraled into a virtual insurrection in 2006, the following
governor put his name on a list of activists to be arrested yet again. When the PRI lost the governorship for the
first time in 70 years in 2010, Gutierrez went to work in the state's migrant
assistance agency.
FIOB is a unique organization created in 1992 by both
Oaxacan migrants in California, and by the communities in Oaxaca from which
they come. It has chapters in four
California cities, in several towns in Baja California in north Mexico where
Oaxacans work as migrants, and in many indigenous towns in Oaxaca itself. Many FIOB activists are teachers because
educators play such an important role in community life. Now FIOB will be headed by two of them --
Gutierrez and Ezequiel Rosales, who led the union during the 2006 strike.
In 2010 both FIOB and the union supported the candidate
who defeated the PRI -- Gabino Cue, the former mayor of Oaxaca's capital
city. That gave teachers enough
political influence to insist that the Oaxaca Institute for Public Education,
which administers the state╒s
schools, begin implementing their PTEO reform.
It's been a fight, however. Two
years ago, Claudio Gonzçlez, one of Mexico's wealthiest and most powerful
businessmen and head of a national group backing standardized testing, warned
Governor CuÄ that he had to ╥break
the hijacking of education by Secciùn 22╙. He called the teachers ╥tyrants.╙ Under pressure
from the PRI administration in Mexico City, Oaxaca's state government is backtracking
on its commitment to PTEO. That's the
reason for the encampment in the zocalo.
A delegate speaks from the floor of the FIOB assembly.
When Cue was elected, FIOB met with him to ask that he
appoint Dominguez, FIOB's former binational coordinator, to head the Oaxacan
Institute for Attention to Migrants. Cue
then declared that his administration was dedicated to implementing the
"right to not migrate." This
right, a centerpiece of FIOB's political program for a decade, calls for
alternatives to forced migration, including better schools, higher agricultural
prices, jobs, and health care in rural areas.
If people have an alternative, FIOB activists argue, they can choose
freely if they want to leave home or not.
FIOB's outgoing binational coordinator, Bernardo Ramirez,
says people in the U.S. don't really understand what causes migration. "The wage here in Oaxaca is 73 pesos
($6) a day," he explains, "and in some of the poorest areas people
are living on 30 pesos a day. They'll
eat if they produce their own corn for tortillas and beans, but they just have
enough money to buy an egg. When the
free trade agreement came in, they lost the market for the little they were
producing. The products coming in from
the U.S. had government support and subsidies.
Mexicans couldn't compete with that.
People see migration as their only option to survive."
In a poor state like Oaxaca it is difficult to provide
the alternative. High hopes for Cue led
to frustration and anger when the state couldn't deliver on many promises of
economic development. FIOB has tried to
encourage its own rural development projects.
"We want people to produce what we eat," Ramirez says,
depending less on buying processed food, or instance.
A delegate speaks from the floor of the FIOB assembly.
FIOB also goes into the schools, especially secondary
schools where young people are already thinking of leaving, to dispel illusions
that life is always better in the north.
"The people who come back just talk about the good part of
migration," Ramirez charges bitterly.
"They don't talk about how many days they had to walk through the
desert. They don't mention that seven or
eight people were sleeping on the floor in the room where they were
living. They don't say they were robbed
or beaten while they were traveling, and the government did nothing."
Therefore, in addition to advocating the right to not
migrate, FIOB also says people have the right to migrate, and to basic human
and civil rights when they do.
Deportations from the U.S. were on everyone's mind. FIOB members in California have been marching
for months to demand a halt to the separation of families, and to support the
thousands of migrants who spend time in detention centers every year. In Oaxaca, people in almost every community
have had a deportation experience that has left its bitter memories.
The California section of FIOB has criticized for years
U.S. proposals for immigration reform, because of their emphasis on enforcement
and guest worker programs. It has called
for a progressive alternative, based on labor and human rights, and at the
Oaxaca meeting voted to join a U.S. network of organizations supporting it, the
Dignity Campaign.
Cheers at the end of the FIOB assembly.
Last year FIOB activists implemented this formal position
by helping Oaxacan farm workers organize an independent union in Washington
State. During that fight the grower
employing them, Sakuma Farms, fired several workers, denied families a space to
live in the company labor camp, and tried to keep wages at the level of the
state's minimum. When workers organized
to protest, ranch owners tried to bring in a replacement force of guest workers
from Mexico, under the H2A work visa program.
During the workers' strike last year, Ramirez went to
Washington State. FIOB and the new
union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, then mobilized opposition that kept the
U.S. Department of Labor from approving the farm's application. In last week's assembly one worker, Herminio
Ortiz Espinoza, described his four years as a guest worker in Canada. "The bosses always yelled at us and
treated us as though we were inferior," he recalled. "I had a friend who protested, and he
was deported right away. After that, we
were all afraid to say anything."
"We've talked with 70% of the people recruited in
Oaxaca, and there are enormous violations of the rights of workers by guest
worker programs," Ramirez adds.
"We're also concerned about the Oaxacans who are
already living in the United States.
Sakuma Farms already had a lot of workers, very good ones. But the grower wanted to keep them from
organizing, defending themselves and demanding higher wages. He knew people here in Mexico are desperate
for work, and that he could make them work for the minimum. He wanted to put Oaxacans into competition
with other Oaxacans. That's why in FIOB
we want an immigration reform in the U.S. that doesn't have guest worker
programs. Migrants need the right to
come and work, but to work with rights."
The newly-elected leaders of the FIOB.
At the end of the assembly, FIOB reiterated its support
for the union at Sakuma Farms, and its opposition to guest worker
programs. When it announced its
opposition a decade ago, it was virtually alone among migrant organizations in
Mexico in doing so. Today, as guest
worker programs grow in the U.S., and the number of people who return with
direct experience in them grows as well, so does that opposition.
As the delegates left at the end of the assembly, a
number went to talk with the teachers in the zocalo, sharing their outrage over
the students killed and kidnapped at the teachers' training school in
Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. This issue is
convulsing Mexico. Banners and signs
hung everywhere in the encampment, expressing revulsion at the attack.
The assembly itself accused the government of
responsibility for Ayotzinapa, calling it "state terrorism that the
government is implementing in order to suppress social protest." Back in
the U.S., FIOB members mounted protests at consulates in Los Angeles, Santa
Maria, San Diego, Oxnard and Fresno. In
a letter delivered in each, FIOB's new officers also demanded that the U.S.
government recognize its responsibility "for the economic and political
instability of Mexico, because it is the greatest consumer of drugs, because it
supports the big corporations that produce the arms used by Mexican criminal
groups, and because it imposed on Mexico the North American Free Trade
Agreement and other neoliberal policies."
A sign in the teachers' encampment in
the main plaza of Oaxaca has a slogan common throughout Mexico:
"Ayotzinapa, your pain in my pain, your fight is my fight. They took
them away alive, and we want them returned alive." It refers to the
murder of six students and the kidnap of another 43 at the teachers'
training college in Ayotzinapa.
The letter added, "We want a Mexico with democracy,
justice and liberty, where young people who are the future of our country can
thrive and participate with their knowledge and skills in building a healthy,
strong and dignified country."
Today people speaking Oaxaca's indigenous languages live
in very distant places, separated by thousands of miles and a militarized
border. But whether in the zocalo or the
FIOB assembly, they increasingly function as a single community. Anti-immigrant hysteria may have come to
dominate politics in the rich countries of the north, but Oaxacans are moving
in the opposite direction. They are
asserting the right to decide when and how crossing borders is in their
interest. And instead of being simply
divided by borders, they are organizing across them.
