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UNITED STATES, BANANA REPUBLIC?

When the train derails 

Will the light shine a little? 

-Ana Belén López, Mexican poet 

 January 8, 2021. In a statement on January 6, referring to the storming of the Capitol by Trump vandals, former Republican President George W. Bush said, “This is how the results of an election are contested in a banana republic -not in our democratic republic. I am amazed at the pernicious conduct of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today towards our institutions, our traditions, and our forces of order.” For her part, Nebraska Republican Senator Deb Fischer said on Twitter, “These mutineers have no constitutional right to harm law enforcement and storm our Capitol. We are a nation of laws, not a banana republic. This must end now.” 

The expressions of these two politicians (and the millions who agree with them) cynically overlook the fact that Central American countries were converted from the late nineteenth century to the present into “banana republics” through the economic exploitation of companies such as the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and its current heir Chiquita Brands. To protect this fabulous business (considered the modern model of savage capitalism in the world), the United States sponsored the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and implanted the military dictatorship of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in 1954. They imposed dictators in Honduras, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic, as well as with other excuses but with the same imperialist purpose, promoted and supported multiple coups d'état and dictatorships in other Latin American countries such as Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti, Uruguay and Chile. Former President George W. H. Bush was president of the Zapata Offshore Co. oil company, which in 1969 bought the United Fruit Company, both companies with strong ties to the CIA and an infamous legacy in Central America. So the statements of George W. Bush, son of the former president of Zapata Offshore, do nothing but point to the guilt of his family in the outrages committed in Latin America to defend his own multinational and convert those countries in “banana republics.”

Compared to what this country has done in many Latin American countries, the January 6 terrorist assault on the United States Capitol is practically child’s play. But the gravity of what happened in the Capitol is in any case extreme for the image of a country that has always been projected as the ideal democracy. Democracy in this country has functioned as a front for the white supremacist system, but never for ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities who have historically been severely disadvantaged and underrepresented in politics, economics, education, arts, media, and culture in general. What we have seen in these past four years is simply the tangible manifestation, the putting on the table of a national reality that runs through the life of this country for four hundred years. What must be done to bring this country closer to a true democracy is to remove, prosecute and imprison the president 45 for his numerous crimes, including leading the terrorist assault against Congress in which five people died, dozens of police officers were injured and it put in check the institutionality of the nation. The right thing to do, if this country wants to be a true democracy, is to denounce its false exceptionalism, the mythical condition instilled generation after generation, that this country is superior to all others and that it has the authority to be the police of the world. This myth hides the historical reality of all the outrages that this country has committed and continues to commit against small and vulnerable countries, those it exploits economically and treats as subordinates and inferiors in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

The first time the derogatory term “banana republic” was used to refer to a country where the United Fruit Company operated is in the novel Cabbages and Kings, by the American writer O. Henry, published in 1904. One hundred and sixteen years later, the images from the desecration of the Capitol by Trump’s fanatical mobs, make the empire look like one of its own banana republics. It is the image in the mirror that gives back tohis own crop of sabotage and interventionism in many nations of the world. 

(Published at Hispanicla.com, January 11, 2021)

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DEFINITELY NOT A BLANK CHECK

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

— Langston Hughes, Afro-American poet

November 21, 2020. They were long and combative months. It was known in advance that November 3 elections were going to be tortuous. They were like none in the years of our life. A campaign in which the absurd fear (absurd as disproportionate) was sown of not turning the United States into a Venezuela or a Cuba. A campaign of false accusations and conspiracies in the midst of a pandemic in which hundred of thousands people have died so far in this country (and hundreds of thousands more in other countries that have followed the denialist and arrogant practices of this administration, such as Brazil and Mexico, to speak only of our continent). The candidate who should win won to stop, even if it is for a while longer, the implacable supremacist agenda of millions of people who deny the human condition to millions of other people who also inhabit this country.

The Biden / Harris victory must have been overwhelming. A strong rejection of the racist and criminal discourse and practices of this government. But the victory was not overwhelming. That more than 74 million people have voted in favor of four more years of this government is only evidence that supremacist racism will remain latent against ethnic and racial minorities in this nation, as it has been for four hundred years. For their part, the more than 81 million who voted for Biden / Harris are just a confirmation that this part of the other voters wanted to maintain the status quo where everything changes to remain the same; others to be able to breathe for a while longer; others, because of the illusion of seeing a woman occupy the vice presidency for the first time and the impulse of actions for social justice; and others simply because there was no other option. In any case, if there is one thing that stands out right now, it is that the Biden / Harris victory is mainly due to the vote of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Juan Andrade Jr., of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, says: “Two undeniable truths emerged in this presidential election. The first is that there are two large voting blocs in the United States: black and white. Both groups participated in exceptionally large numbers in the 2020 elections. The second is that Hispanics are the third largest voting bloc, and neither whites nor blacks can elect any president without the support of Hispanics. ”(1) . Obviously, this equation could have changed if all Latinos with the ability to vote had done so. Latinos already have the numbers to be the second electoral force in the country. Although this was the time in history that more Latino voters participated, we still need to continue to push for a massive vote in upcoming elections. Puerto Rican journalist Juan González, author of Harvest of Empire and professor of communications and public policy at Rutgers University, indicates that “Twenty million six hundred thousand Latinos went to the polls in this election, 64% of the 32 million Latinos eligible to vote, while in previous elections the turnout has almost always been less than 50%. In crude figures, 8 million more Latinos voted than in 2016. That is, a 63% increase in relation to the last presidential elections” (2).

Added to these data, we must mention the significant vote of the indigenous population. Particularly moving is the history of the Navajo of Arizona, a state that had maintained a Republican majority for the past two decades. On this occasion, 60-90% of the 67,000 eligible Navajo voters voted for Biden / Harris and were instrumental in bringing victory to the Democratic candidates. One of the great obstacles for the Navajo, as for the other 562 tribes, which number more than 5.2 million people, has been the fact that they do not have a postal address, which is a requirement to be able to vote. This requirement is one of the strategies of the political system to suppress the vote of the natives, a strategy that also includes the criminalization and mass incarceration of Blacks, Latinos and indigenous people, which means that people who are in jail do not have the right to vote in most states. In eleven states, those who have committed certain crimes and served sentences cannot vote indefinitely and often for life (3). This year, Allie Young, a 30-year-old Navajo, in coordination with Google, launched a campaign to give a mailing address to more than 4,000 young people of voting age and mobilized thousands to ride horseback for ten miles to polling stations, helping to ensure Democratic victory in the state (4). The fourth numerically significant group are Asian Americans, who today comprise more than 20 million, of which 11 million are eligible to vote. According to the data available to date, 67% of the counted vote of this group was for the Democratic formula.

The electoral victory of Biden / Harris is thus a victory committed at least with these four sectors that represent 40% of the total population together with other minority sectors. Biden / Harris are a political duo who don’t necessarily have the best record for past actions with minorities: Joe Biden for opposing the use of buses to take black children to predominantly white schools as a means of promoting equal opportunity; and a 1994 criminal law that ended up seriously affecting Black and Latino people. Kamala Harris for her record as California Attorney General in the 1990s, implementing laws that led to the disproportionate incarceration of Blacks in that state. The two have won the elections on the promise of helping to build a better present and future for these populations. But voters have an eye on their decisions and actions, in a country where there is an unprecedented interest in what the rulers do. As if their life depended on it. Because it is exactly that.

Biden presents himself as the unifier of a country that has never been divided, simply because it has never been a unit. What has happened in these past four years is that the country and the world have been able to see, in full deployment and at the tip of tweets and executive orders, the inequalities and divisions that have existed since their origins, based on a tacit and explicit concept of racial superiority and origin. The resistance of the naked king to abandon the throne is the perfect symbol, for the extreme and carnivalesque, of this assumed arrogance. But he will have to go whether he wants to or not. Meanwhile, many of those who voted for Biden / Harris look, among other things, for social justice and reparation. For a place at the table of discussions and decisions. For a scientific and concerted plan to control the pandemic at the national level. For a demand for their rights to affordable housing, sanitation, equal access to education, environmental protection policies, an immigration reform in favor of DACA and asylum for migrants at the border with Mexico. For a dismantling of most of Trump’s 200 executive orders. And none of these demands is requested as a favor but rather as a right. How it should be required to ask for forgiveness for the historical genocide against indigenous peoples, for slavery and oppression against Blacks throughout 400 years, for the oppression and cornering suffered by the Latino population that has been in this country at least one hundred years before the English, and speaking in Spanish. For the moral, economic, social and political reparation of these and other populations that have historically been victimized. As the chorus of Langston Hughes' poem repeats, For I’se still goin’, honey, / I’se still climbin’, / And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Works cited

1) Andrade Jr., Juan. “Latinos Put Biden Over the Top”. United States Hispanic Leadership Institute. Nov 12, 2020. https://www.ushli.org/

2 ) González, Juan. “Los grandes medios se equivocan, la participación récord de la gente latina favoreció a Biden y el voto de la gente blanca lo perjudicó”. Democracy Now!. 13 de noviembre, 2020. https://www.democracynow.org/es

3) “Restoration of Voting Rights for Felons”. National Conference of State Legislatures. 10/1/2020. https://www.ncsl.org/

4) Saxena, Kalyani. “How The Navajo Nation Helped Flip Arizona For Democrats”. November 13, 2020. npr.org

Vindictas. Cuentistas latinoamericanas. I want to recommend this absolute novelty of the UNAM within the series of novels and short stories written by women from different Latin American countries during the 20th century. Its publication responds to the need to make visible writers who were denied the literary space not only in the canon but in its very presence on the cultural scene. An invitation to get closer to writers whose work we should have known for a long time.

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ROUTE 66 AND THE SUNDOWN TOWNS

“N ..., don't let the sun set on you in this town”

 “No Mexicans after sunset”

“Whites only within city limits after dark”

  —Signs at the entrance of towns and cities on Route 66

 August 16, 2020. We were attending a meeting of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Garfield Park in South Pasadena, California, when a young artist and activist spoke from the microphone referring to the so-called "Sunset Towns" (Sundown Towns). I have lived in Pasadena, neighboring South Pasadena, for more than two decades, and this was the first time I had heard the term “Sundown Towns.” I must have heard it long before. But no. It was the first time. The young woman briefly mentioned what it was about: cities where no black person was allowed to live, and in most cases no one of Chinese, Mexican, Jewish origin, or anyone who was not considered “white.” They could work during the day in various trades within the city limits, but as soon as dusk began they had to leave, at the risk of being forcibly expelled by the police or the vigilantes.

Making the connections I saw that this still open chapter of American racism tries to be made visible in the film The Green Book, directed by Peter Farrelly, which won the Oscar for best movie of 2018 for its portrait of an Italian-American chauffeuring a black musician as they travel along Route 66 giving classical music concerts in Southern cities of the US. After exploring the history of the Sundown Towns, one can see that the reality is much worse than described superficially and accommodatingly in the film. The book on which the film's plot is based was a travel guide, The Black Motorist Green Book, which helped black travelers know which hotels, restaurants and recreational sites they can go to without facing brutal rejection. The guide's publisher, African-American Victor Hugo Green, published new editions periodically with updated instructions for a journey that exposed travelers to the crudest and most ruthless racism. The film makes no mention of Green's book, thus concealing a fundamental truth of this story tied to the Jim Crow laws of segregation and exclusion.

 The Sundown Towns achieved notoriety as a result of a national project to build a highway that would facilitate travel from Chicago to the Pacific shores of Southern California. It was named Route 66 and eventually became the most famous highway in the United States and a symbol of freedom and progress for the white population. Numerous books can be read exalting the greatness of the United States through the natural and urban landscapes of which it was popularized with the name of The Mother Route. It's the highway in Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the nomadic hippies of the sixties. But as is typical in the official narrative, all this celebratory imagery of the manifest destiny concealed the dark side of racism suffered by anyone who was not accepted as part of the “true American” identity, that is, all those who were not part of the Anglo-American population.

 On the outskirts of thousands of towns and cities in many states, including those through which Route 66 passes, there were signs like the ones I mention in the epigraph. South Pasadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Arcadia, Azusa, Fontana, are just a few of many cities in Southern California that were part of this and other forms of racial and ethnic discrimination and segregation, which included disappearances and lynchings. Some people say that all of this is part of a past that is now over. It is not true. There are still towns in the United States that are still Sundown Towns, like Norwood, a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio; or Sapulpa and Broken Arrow, in Oklahoma, and countless other cities, which the reader can find searching the internet. Or watching the documentary The Injustice Files: Sundown Towns, one of the most revealing about the existence of this racist practice in the United States today.

But a city or town in the United States does not need to be specifically a Sundown Town to be classified as such. The segregationist effects and practices against minorities remain latent in multiple areas of the country's life such as education, work, and the demographic and physical distribution of neighborhoods. It is clear that the police are more protective of the neighborhoods where Anglo-American people live, while criminalizing and persecuting people in the neighborhoods where the black and Latino population live. Racism exarced from the White House, is evidence that this is one of the most persistent evils in the country. One of the key functions of the Black Lives Matter Movement is to uncover these historical iniquities, name them, describe them, and work to dismantle them. And that was the mission of the young woman who spoke in days past in Garfield Park in South Pasadena.

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This week I recommend two books: Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, by Ed Morales, Nuyorican, professor at Columbia University, New York, on the growing demographic, political and social importance of the more than 60 million Latinos in the United States. Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latinx, are some of the terms to try to encapsulate in one word a diverse population that is currently the second largest group in the United States and that in a few decades will become the majority of the country. Available in English. The other book is the novel Natural History, by the Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca, who, after living for many years in Puerto Rico and on the east coast of the United States, now lives in London. An experimental novel that collects an iconoclastic tradition, in the manner of the novels of the Argentine Macedonio Fernández, and going through a century of literary and artistic postmodern transgressions.

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LITERATURE AND ART (ALWAYS) FIGHT BACK

“Will poetry go viral? / Will her disease infect us? /

                                 Will it help to create antibodies against indifference? /

                               Will the poems be the only safe spaces where we can meet?”

                                                           —Julia Álvarez in How Will the Pandemic Affect Poetry?

 No. It is not an apology for disaster. But the truth is that when natural catastrophes occur, wars, pandemics, art flourishes, expands, finds new nooks through which to infiltrate the tissues of life and respiration. It is the urgency to explain ourselves, to protest, to follow the crowd forward. From apocalyptic books and works of art heralding an end around the corner and all sorts of alarmist speculation, to those praising the benefits of a new and positive global realignment, the arts, especially those that require or can be arranged with with minimal face-to-face interaction, are experiencing an exceptional production moment. It has been this way since the origins of memory. Tragedies, natural or human, are traumatic scenarios that force us to seek answers or entertain ourselves as we enter a new and unknown normality. For everyone it is a matter of individual and collective survival.

The arts have been not only a way to record these periods of history but also to recreate them, to reimagine the dynamics of society, the ways of continuing to exist and of perceiving and considering the future. Thus the biblical texts of catastrophes such as the flood, the plagues of Egypt or the horse of death that drags with it the sword of hunger and plague are part of the construction of the imaginary before an ever fragile existence. The History of the Peloponnesian War, from Thucydides, from the beginning of the 5th century BC, where it narrates the so-called “Plague of Athens”, would become the text that models the narratives of the epidemics of the following centuries. In the European Middle Ages, stories and art arising from the bubonic plague, such as Boccaccio's The Decameron published in the fourteenth century, and Brueghel the Elder's painting The Triumph of Death, from the early sixteenth century, They enter that hemisphere that redeems tragedy and transforms it into an aesthetic experience. The Third Relation, one of the annals written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Mexican indigenous historian Domingo Chimalpahin, which relates an epidemic, possibly of diphtheria, which occurred a few decades before the arrival of the Spanish. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas and other texts of his time from which we know that after all, it was the conquerors who brought the plagues that infested the continent, such as smallpox, measles, and typhus. In the eighteenth century A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe, which narrates the plague of London in 1665. Already in the twentieth century, The Plague, by Camus, a novel that these days is being revisited by curious critics and readers , some of whom find that the text has lost much of the force it had at the time. Or in this short mention of texts, the tragically beautiful Ensayo de la ceguera, by Saramago.

In our days, in the midst of one of the worst pandemics of modern times, creative expressions are present above all in the print media (books, newspapers, magazines) or audiovisual media (television, cinema, internet) and their presence is, in many cases, clairvoyant and pointing to what the world can be in our immediate future. Of course, all this marvelous production has nothing to do, fortunately for art, with the drama of the coronavirus, but also with even more devastating and damaging pandemics in the medium and long term, such as the resurgence of nationalisms and fascisms that threaten democracies, always vulnerable and never entirely established. Or an art that worries about other urgent crises such as the environment, immigration or the social justice movements, all of them intimately interconnected. There is also, as always, an escapist art, or an art for art's sake, or an art that happily withdraws from the present. And this is also a necessary art, because art does not necessarily have to be an instrument for other purposes. The primary objective of art is its very existence as a point of convergence with our humanity.

From the extensive list of productions that bring us closer to the present day, I would like to mention the essay The Monster at Our Door, by the sociologist and activist Mike Davis, a re-updating of a text he wrote in 2005, which links the emergence of pests such as the coronavirus with the environmental problems and the handling of the crisis by corrupt governments. I also recommend the book No Human is Illegal, by immigration lawyer J. J. Mulligan Sepúlveda, who explores the drama experienced by immigrants in detention centers on the United States-Mexico border. And the poem book Together In a Sudden Strangeness with multiple voices of poets from the United States facing the common experience of the pandemic. Among the many art museums, I'd like to suggest a look at the Museum of Latin American Art (molaa.org) in Long Beach, Calif., and browse their virtual exhibits, especially “OaxaCalifornia: Through the Experience of the Duo Tlacolulokos”. And the museum La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (lapca.org), which offers virtual exhibitions and a continuous program of live broadcast activities. The world becomes recursive in the face of crises. And art, as it has been through the ages, is one of its most dynamic and lasting expressions, one of the spaces from which life continues to emerge.

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INDEPENDENCE FOR WHOM?

Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams / For when dreams go

Life is a barren field / Frozen with snow.

                 —Langston Hughes, African-American poet

Many winters ago our wise ancestors predicted:

the white-eyed monster will come from the east.

And as he advanced would consume the land.

This monster is the white race and the prediction is near its fulfilment.

               —Prophecy of the Iroquois, confederation of tribes in present-day NY state

While listening to the outbursts and watching the splendid fireworks of 4th of July, we must not forget that Independence Day does not celebrate freedom or the end of oppression for all who lived in the United States in 1776. Slaves continued to be slaves and indigenous people continued to be exterminated and those who survived were subjected to living decades later on reservations assigned by European invaders. The independence of the United States was designed and won by and so that the English colonists could have autonomy to perpetuate themselves as the new masters of these stolen lands.

Independence was, above all, for English men. Because women continued to be subjected, without voice or right to vote until 1920 (and still, one hundred years later, with a long way to go to obtain full rights). As Howard Zinn says of the times of independence, “If we read the most orthodox history books, we may forget half of the country's population. Explorers were men, landowners and merchants were men, political leaders were men, and so were military figures. The very invisibility of women and the oblivion to which they were subjected, indicate their submerged condition” (The Other History of the United States, 2001, 81). Freedom was not for them.

Nor was it for blacks who remained slaves until Lincoln's 1862 Proclamation of Emancipation of Slaves during the Civil War. This proclamation never really represented complete freedom, neither in practice nor legally, as shown by the Jim Crow laws (in force in various states between 1876 and 1965) that legalized segregation and whose effects are clearly felt in absolute social inequality and lack of opportunities for today's African-American population. Or the ominous Amendment 13th of 1865 that constitutionally authorizes to this day the continuation of slavery within the prison system: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The application of this amendment is manifested in the criminal mass incarceration in the United States, the country with the most prisoners in the world, the vast majority of them African-Americans (and indigenous and Latino in second and third place), subjected to forced labor with little or no pay for corporations that profit from their incarceration and work (here is a report on these corporations: “Post Meek Mill: Report Discloses Companies Profiting from Prison,” May 7, 2018). The African-American population has never been passive; they has always fought in an enormously unequal way against the iniquities to which they has been subjected up to the present, as we continue to see with the Black Lives Matter Movement, which perhaps, if continues in the fight permanently, will become the moment of change most decisive in history against racism in the United States.

Nor can the indigenous people celebrate Independence Day as a victory for their people. Independence for them would have been to get rid of the invaders of their territories. So the indigenous people of this country, like those of the entire continent, continue to live in a state of non-freedom within their own lands. The indigenous people have always offered fierce resistance to the invasion of their territories. When they realized that the arrival of the Europeans on their land was actually an invasion that ended up stripping them of their lands, they fought first as independent tribes and then as confederations of indigenous groups. They played a subordinate active role during the 13-states war of independence, either alongside the English empire or the English colonists (allied with the French), as these powers alternately offered to be their protectors. On either side, nothing worked for them. In 1851 Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act through which the reservation system for indigenous people was created as a way to keep them under control: natives could not get out of there without government permission. This and other subsequent laws on federal government control of native communities were superseded by The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 which gave greater autonomy to the 567 federally recognized indigenous tribes of the country, including having their own constitution and not pay federal taxes. But the problems of marginalization, poverty, lack of health services and the drama of alcoholism and drugs, caused by centuries of colonialism, are rampant within an economy that depends on tourism and casinos, a system in which they are subject to the constant looting and exploitation of their identity and culture.

Evidently what is celebrated every 4th of July is the victory of the English colonists to obtain the freedom to continue to command a government meticulously created to the measure of white supremacism. The same would have to happen, with its own nuances and variations, with the Spanish Criollos who advanced the independence of the Spanish-speaking countries. What is celebrated is, as usual, the history of the victors. In this case, the defeated continue to fight, because they are not defeated. As the African-American poet Hugues sang, they “hold fast to dreams” from a world that is their own and is the standard and not the exception in history.

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Today I recommend the book The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison. The text is a collection of the lectures she gave at Harvard University in 2016 where she discusses the concept of race and the construction of white racism in American society. The talks and the book coincide with the presidency of Donald Trump, one of the stages of this country when racism, police brutality against African-American and Latino communities, persecution of immigrants by ICE, rhetoric against Latinos and the urgency for build the wall on the border with Mexico, are in the forefront of daily news. Morrison illustrates her speech through various literary works, including her own.

Another book that I recommend is War Against all Puerto Ricans. Revolution and Terror in America's Colony, by the journalist and lawyer Nelson A. Denis, born in NY to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father. He has developed a journalistic career and legal committed to the defense of Latinos in the United States. Graduated from Harvard and Yale universities, was director of El Diario / La Prensa and represented New York's 68th Assembly district, which includes the East Harlem and Spanish Harlem neighborhoods from 1997 to 2000. The book recounts the insurrection by the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico in 1950 against the United States government in search of the island's independence and the bloody US military retaliation that included the bombing of Jayuya and Utuado, marking the first time that the US bombarded cities under its jurisdiction.

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THIS IS NOT A COUNTRY OF IMMIGRANTS

  "I'm not from here / but neither are you

Nowhere at all / a little everywhere ”

—Jorge Drexler, en Movimiento

 June 25, 2020. For decades, the romantic and misleading idea that the United States is a country of immigrants has been fueled. It is time to question and dismantle that myth. This is not a country of immigrants. At least not voluntary immigrants millions of them. This country has been built by the hardworking minds and hands of people from many parts of the world. That is a truth that is supported by its own evidence. What we cannot sustain, in a generic and thoughtless way, is that the more than 330 million that make up this country are here because their relatives or themselves, at some point in history, freely chose to come as immigrants. And, of course, the Anglo-Saxons of America, who still make up the majority of the population, do not include or perceive themselves as immigrants but as the founders of the country. For them, immigrants are the others.

But the country's nearly 7 million indigenous people are not immigrants. Their lands were taken from them by European invaders and colonizers, who massacred millions of them, in what Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado calls the most “vast sustained genocide in history.” The rest were subjected to living on reservations, where they survive with high levels of poverty, health problems and alcoholism. The more than 43 million African Americans are also not immigrants. Their ancestors were brought in as chained slaves and crowded into stinking ships and then sold to English masters who exploited them on their large estates. A significant part of the wealth that was accumulated from the exploitation and forced labor of slaves between 1525 and 1866 is one of the foundations of the current wealth of the United States. As we know, a large majority of the descendants of those slaves continue to live in the same conditions of contempt, oppression, poverty and lynching danger as 400 years ago.

Of the 60 million Latinos / Hispanics / Chicanos in the United States, a significant number cannot be considered immigrants. Mexicans have been here since the times of the Spanish colony 500 years ago. They were already here when the USA invaded northern Mexico and eventually seized (through the forced Guadalupe Hidalgo Treat of 1848) what are now the states of California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. States where Spanish was the language of a large part of that territory along with the languages ​​of the natives. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. The United States turned Puerto Rico into a colony when it was taken from Spain in the war of 1898. Then it gave them citizenship so that they could send them as soldiers to fight wars that had nothing to do with them.

Cubans, Dominicans, like millions of Central and South Americans are not immigrants. Many of them are descendants, or first or second generation, of people who sought refuge in the United States as a result of the political and economic turmoil caused in large part by the intervention of the United States in those countries in the past and present decades. Millions of them are refugees, not immigrants. And similar stories can be told of people from China and other Asian countries, the Middle East and other parts of the world.

 Perhaps the first masses of northern Europe were immigrants who were greeted effusively by the statue of liberty in Manhattan, at a time when documents were not required to enter this country. For millions of African Americans and Latin Americans it was never and has not been a party to come to this country, but a fight. The result has been the world's most diverse mosaic of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. A mosaic of iniquities and unequal inequalities, where white supremacism, driven by savage capitalism, is the controlling and oppressing force of the rest of the population. It is this mosaic of intelligent and hard-working people from all over the world that has fundamentally built a prosperity that is neither in their hands nor under their control. The American dream (another myth that projects this country as a kind of human ideal) is always an elusive image for the vast majority. Now, if we want to put it in other terms, we are all immigrants. We are all in perpetual motion, in a world that, as Ciro Alegría said, is broad and alien. With a gruesome number of supremacists who assume it is broad and belong to them.

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This week I recommend two books: Crux. A Cross-Border Memoir, by investigative journalist Jean Guerrero. A memory about the history of his father submerged from a time here in what some identify as schizophrenia, and that in the eyes of the narrator begins to be seen as a deeper worldview that intertwines the ancient cultures of Mexico with the present chaotic on the United States-Mexico border. Another book that I recommend is Cuentos salvajes, by the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero. This volume of more than 500 pages is presented as the collection of all his stories published so far and allows us to see the evolution of the writer from oneiric and fantastic prose to a more realistic narrative connected to the Andean universe. In Spanish.

 A COUNTRY THAT CAN NO LONGER BREATHE

June 1, 2020. Dawn dawns, and one wishes that the world were no longer once and for all the same as yesterday. Dawn is breaking, and in dozens of cities across this country millions of people have spent the night in double confinement: quarantine and curfew. This double anomaly emphasizes the drama of a world whose natural and social forces have long pushed for radical change. In the last long months the only tiresome, painful news was that of the anonymous or named dead, but all of them lonely, who accumulated in the hospital morgues in this country, first in the virus as in so many other things . Suddenly, on May 27, the slow and ruthless lynching of George Floyd, arrested allegedly for trying to buy cigarettes at a store with a fake $ 20 bill, changed the narrative and once again brought us face to face with the horror of the most ancient of its plagues: that of rampant racism that runs liquid through the veins of this nation from its colonial origins.

A teenager recorded the 8 minutes and 46 seconds in which police officer Dereck Chauvin smashed Floyd's neck with one of his knees while staring impassively at the cell phone recording his crime. His arrogant attitude sums up the centuries of slavery, oppression, mass incarceration, and unpunished murder to which governments and North American justice have subjected the black population (and Latinos, indigenous people, other minorities, and numerous countries of the world) .

What Chauvin, and the other two policemen who also crushed Floyd's body against the asphalt, did not expect, were the repercussion that his crime was going to have. Nor did Tou Thao, the fourth policeman who stood up, kept an eye on him so that none of those who witnessed the lynching came close. Floyd died shortly after in an ambulance took him away dying. A few hours after his death there was a social outbreak across the country. Suddenly tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities and conditions in many states of the country - and especially young people - forgot about the coronavirus, of confinement, of the imminent risk of contagion, and took to the streets in a spontaneous movement of rage, pain and solidarity with the Floyd family and with the black population in general.

The protests have continued to grow in the five days that have passed since the murder, taking the course of a social uprising that has not been seen in the country for decades. The social satiety is much greater now, because we live under the pandemic of a racist and autocrat president who is the brutal and unmistakable expression of contempt and oppression against defenseless and vulnerable minorities. In the midst of a deadly pandemic (one of the symptoms of which is that those infected cannot breathe), people have shown by taking to the streets to demand radical change that the most dangerous virus they face is white supremacy.

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Today I want to recommend AN AFRICAN AND LATINX HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (available only in English) written by professor of history and director of the Oral History Program Samuel Proctor of the University of Florida. It is one of the most lucid, current and indispensable texts to rethink the knowledge of the true history of the United States from the perspective of blacks and Latinos fighting for social justice and equality for more than 400 years. Ortiz says, “I have written this book because as a scholar I want to make sure that no black or Latinx student ever has to be ashamed of who they are and where they come from.”

PANDEMIC NOTEBOOKS

THE URGENCY OF THE NORMAL

May 25, 2020. A friend from another country writes to me and asks how things are in California these days. I reply: “Things are much better in terms of the number of infections and daily deaths compared to about two months ago. These have been diminished in large part by the tight control imposed by the state government and that of the cities and counties. Now a cautious opening has begun, which doesn't really seem that cautious. You see traffic on freeways and streets almost like a “normal” day before quarantine. Many drive fast and impatient, as if these months had barely stirred spirits and produced no fundamental changes. In a society like this, where savage capitalism and consumerism define the ethos / pathos of a good part of the population, it is unlikely to see changes in a relatively short period of time. There is an urgent need to reactivate the economy in the country, to continue at the usual pace of life, where those with economic and political power resist the changes required to create a more just and equal society and, of course, to manage (and perhaps avoid) the next epidemics to come. It is still too early to predict the true impact of this crisis created by our own greed and by the indescribable looting, violence and extermination to which we subject animals and the environment in general.

“We are abnormal. But we don't realize it. So we think about going back to normal. What we need is to become truly abnormal and start building another possible world, another society, another way of being and existing. But we have not yet learned how to do it and perhaps we will never learn how to do it. Or perhaps a few will learn one or two lessons that will represent some change, small but hopeful. Life is also made of those small big changes, isn't it? For now, my friend, we are still dominated by our most primitive impulses and with the desire to continue installed in this self-destructive whirlpool.”

LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVES. 

I recommend this novel by the Mexican author Valeria Luiselli. A story close to our reality, including the sounds and voices of which we are populated, the thousands of immigrant children persecuted on the southern border of the United States, the ever-present past of the genocide of indigenous peoples, and in the midst of everything, the family that narrates its own version of the chaos and desintegration as it moves from north to south and diagonally across the vast territory of this country.