Un mensaje de agradecimiento a los que donaron las cobijas

UN AGRADECIMIENTO A TODOS LOS QUE DONARON LAS COBIJAS PARA LA COMUNIDAD MIXTECA DE VALLE VERDE, TIJUANA

Saludos a nuestros amigos, hermanas y hermanos, compañeras y compañeros—

De parte de toda la gente mixteca de la comunidad de Valle Verde, Tijuana, les agradecemos sus donaciones de cobijas. Durante esta temporada de frío, todos los habitantes de la comunidad mixteca les agradecen, de todo corazón, su generosidad y solidaridad.

Fuimos a visitar a las señoras de la cooperativa “Mujeres Mixtecas” en Valle Verde y les entregamos las cobijas. Durante dicha visita, las señoras nos encargaron unos recados para pasarles a Vds, los que colaboraron con sus donaciones de cobijas. He aquí la traducción en español de los mensajes, que se dieron en mixteco:

Doña Berta:

"Estamos muy agradecidos con Ustedes porque nos apoyaron con estas cobibas. Qué Dios los bendiga porque nos han apoyado mucho. Muchos saludos a todos."

Doña Francisca:

"Qué Dios los bendiga por este apoyo que nos han compartido. Qué bien que nosotras conocemos a Daniel, a David y a los demás, porque nosotras no tenemos la forma de contactar a las demás personas que están por allá. No sabemos dónde están ni cómo se llaman, pero de alguna manera todos ellos han logrado contactar a Daniel y a David y pudieron ir donde están ellos para entregarles las cobijas. Y por ello estamos muy agradecidas."

Doña Berta también nos compartió un refrán mixteco:

"Rataá va'aíní kixia mií suértera."

"Al hombre de buen corazón, la suerte se le acerca solita."

Aquí está un link con un video de las señoras dictando sus mensajes en mixteco:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq1WRWNnKTw

De nuevo volvemos a agradecerles su colaboración y apoyo para nuestros hermanos y hermanas mixtecos de Valle Verde.

Les invitamos a conocer a las señoras más a fondo. El sábado 23 de febrero se realizará un encuentro con las integrantes de la cooperativa “Mujeres Mixtecas” en la Escuela Sor Juana de Tijuana.

Las Mujeres Mixtecas prepararán una comida tradicional mixteca para todos. Se sugiere una donación por la comida. Intercambiaremos idiomas, culturas, historias y conocimientos. Esperamos que cada uno de los participantes pueda compartir su lengua mientras aprendemos juntos mixteco, español e inglés por medio de la conversación y el intercambio social.

Les pasamos un link para la versión en línea de la invitación:

http://cafeontheborder.blogspot.com/2013/02/invitacion-intercambio-cultural-con.html

Finalmente, quisiéramos invitarles a seguir en contacto con las señoras mixtecas de la cooperativa. Si desean conocerlas en persona, con mucho gusto los llevaremos a Tijuana para conocer el taller donde trabajan las señoras, de veras que son personas muy hospitalarias y hermosas. En su taller, fabrican varias prendas de ropa a mano—blusas artesanales, uniformes escolares, mandiles, vestidos y otras prendas. Les pedimos, también, que nos compartan sus ideas—que nos sugieran ideas de personas, organizaciones, tiendas o escuelas que podrían estar interesados en comprarles la ropa a las integrantes de la cooperativa “Mujeres Mixtecas”, para promover un comercio más directo y solidario y evitar la explotación que tantas veces se produce a través del comercio convencional.

Les pasamos un link para la página web de “Mujeres Mixtecas”:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/

Aquí hay unas fotos del taller:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/p/pictures.html

Y un poco de información sobre las prendas:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/p/products.html

De nuevo les agradecemos su colaboración y su apoyo. Les solicitamos nos hagan el grandísimo favor de reenviar el link para la página web de la cooperativa “Mujeres Mixtecas” a todas las personas que podrían interesarse, para que se pueda visibilizar la cooperativa. De parte de toda la gente de Valle Verde, ¡Saludos y muchas gracias!

Tcha’vindo! (Gracias)

-David

C.A.F.E. – Creating Alternative and Fair Enterprise

Thank you message to all who participated in the blanket drive

THANKS TO ALL WHO DONATED BLANKETS FOR THE MIXTEC COMMUNITY IN VALLE VERDE, TIJUANA

  

[Para la versión en español, haz clic aquí] 

Hello friends, sisters and brothers—

On behalf of all the Mixtec indigenous people of Valle Verde, Tijuana, Mexico, thank you all for your generous donations of blankets. As the cold weather hits this winter, all the people of the community are extremely grateful for your solidarity.

When we visited the ladies with the “Mujeres Mixtecas” clothing coop in Valle Verde to drop off the blankets, the ladies asked us to pass on a short message to everyone who donated these blankets. Here are the messages, translated:

Doña Berta:

“We really want to thank all of you a great deal for helping us out with these blankets. May God bless you all for this; you have really helped us a lot. Warm regards to all of you.”

Doña Francisca:

“May God bless all of you for sharing these blankets with us. We are very glad to be in touch with Daniel, David and all the rest of the people who have been in contact with us, because through them, we’re able to be in contact with all the rest of you out there. We may not know where you are or what your names are, but we thank God that you have all somehow managed to get in touch with Daniel and David and found out about this blanket drive, and donated these blankets. We are extremely thankful to all of you for that.”

Doña Berta also shared with us a traditional Mixtec folk saying:

"Rataá va'aíní kixia mií suértera."

[TRANSLATION] “When a person has a good heart, good luck comes to them naturally.”

Again, thank you very much for helping out our Mixtec sisters and brothers in Valle Verde with the donated blankets.

Here is a video of the women expressing their thanks, in their native Mixtec language:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq1WRWNnKTw

In fact, we’d like to invite you to get to know the amazing ladies who are part of the “Mujeres Mixtecas” sewing coop a little better. On February 23, Saturday, we will be having a get-together with them at a private school in Tijuana.

The ladies will be serving homemade, traditional Guerrero-style mole, and will have some samples of the clothing they make. We will learn from them more of their stories—how they came to Tijuana from southern Mexico—and will learn about the ancient and beautiful Mixtec culture. We will be having a “language exchange” time when we will all teach each other some phrases and words from the Mixtec, English and Spanish languages. It will be a great time—we invite all of you to join us.

Here is a link to the invitation online:

http://cafeontheborder.blogspot.com/2013/02/invitacion-intercambio-cultural-con.html

We’d also like to invite you to stay in touch with the ladies from the “Mujeres Mixtecas” coop. There are many ways to do this. Any time you would like to meet them, we’ll be glad to take you down to their shop in Tijuana to get to know them firsthand—they really are amazing people. And they make beautiful clothing: artisanal blouses, school uniforms, aprons, dresses, and many other articles of clothing. If anybody has ideas for possible buyers—people who would like to support a worker-owned coop by buying directly from these Mixtec women, rather than buying from a corporation that uses sweatshops and pays miserable wages—please, let us know.

Here is a link to a blog for the “Mujeres Mixtecas” coop, with some basic info on the coop:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/

Some photos from the shop:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/p/pictures.html

And some info on the clothing the women create:

http://valleverdecoop.blogspot.com/p/products.html

Feel free to contact us with any questions, comments, ideas, etc. In the meantime, if you only do one thing to follow up with the folks who have been so helped by these blanket donations—please, we ask you to pass on the above website to anybody you can think of, to let them know about the “Mujeres Mixtecas” coop.

Thank you again, and best regards to all of you from the people of Valle Verde!

Tchá’vindo! (Thank you)

Invitación a intercambio cultural con integrantes de la cooperativa "Mujeres Mixtecas"

[English version appears below]

Se les extiende la presente invitación--

Se celebrará con un intercambio cultural entre la comunidad de mujeres mixtecas de Tijuana y los amigos de librería Sor Juana. El encuentro destacará el fenómeno local de diversificación lingüística a través del intercambio entre el mixteco y el español.

MUJERES MIXTECAS, colectivo artesanal que se dedica a producir blusas bordadas y otras prendas a mano, estará compartiendo su lengua, historia y cultura.

Mujeres Mixtecas preparará una comida tradicional mixteca para todos. Se sugiere una donación por la comida.

Esperamos que cada uno de los participantes pueda compartir su lengua mientras aprendemos juntos mixteco, español e inglés por medio de la conversación y el intercambio social.

El encuentro se llevará a cabo el sábado, 23 de febrero, de las 2:00 hras a las 5:00 hras p.m. en la Librería de la Escuela Sor Juana en Tijuana:

Av. Las Palmas 4390, frac. Las Palmas, 22106

favor de contactarnos para mayor información, cafeontheborder@gmail.com

Tchá'vindo!

¡Gracias!

Thank you!

[ENGLISH VERSION]

We would like to invite you to join us for a cultural and linguistic exchange with Mixtec women from Valle Verde, Tijuana, to learn more about the beautiful cultural and linguistic diversity of Baja California and the border region. We will be sharing languages and traditions with each other, chatting in Mixtec and Spanish, at this event in the bookstore of the Sor Juana school in Tijuana.

The artisanal clothing coop "MUJERES MIXTECAS" is a worker-owned coop, made up of Mixtec indigenous women who sew embroidered blouses, aprons, school uniforms, and other clothing articles by hand. They will be sharing with us a bit of their language, history and culture.

The women from MUJERES MIXTECAS will be preparing a traditional Mixtec meal for all of us, available for a donation.

We invite all of you to join us as well all share with each other our traditions and languages--Mixtec, Spanish and English--by conversing and interacting with each other over a delicious plate of hot mole, rice and tortillas.

This event will take place on Saturday, February 23, 2:00 - 5:00 pm, in the bookstore of the Sor Juana school (address below):

 Escuela Sor Juana

Av. Las Palmas 4390, frac. Las Palmas, 22106

Please contact us for more information: cafeontheborder@gmail.com

Tchá'vindo!

Gracias!

Thank you!

BLANKETS FOR VALLE VERDE

We’ve received a request from the women of the “Mujeres Mixtecas” sewing coop in the Mixtec indigenous community of Valle Verde, Tijuana—many people in the neighborhood need blankets.

We are coming into the coldest time of year, and many residents of Valle Verde live in pretty sparse conditions. A lot of the houses have thin walls, and some nights it can almost feel like you’re sleeping outdoors. When temperatures get this low, you need all the blankets you can get.

COLLECTION POINT

People in San Diego area can leave donated blankets and comforters at the following location:

“Western Service Workers Association”
Located in Barrio Logan
 3014 Imperial Avenue

Tell the folks at WSWA that the blankets are for Valle Verde or “C.A.F.E.”.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFO ON THE MIXTECS OF VALLE VERDE:

The Mixtec people are one of many indigenous ethnicities in Mexico. Often marginalized, discriminated against and exploited, unable to survive from rural agriculture because of unfair “free” trade agreements, many Mixtec people migrate to northern Mexico. Valle Verde was founded a couple decades ago by Mixtec people, mostly from the southern State of Guerrero. The community has a long history of community organizing, drawing from ancient traditions of “usos y costumbres” in indigenous communities.

“Mujeres Mixtecas” is a worker-owned business made up of Mixtec women from Valle Verde. The women have a sewing shop where they create clothing, blouses, aprons, school uniforms, and other articles. The women created the coop to try to develop alternative sources of income and provide for their families. This December, the women from the “Mujeres Mixtecas” coop have decided to help out their neighbors in Valle Verde. And they’ve asked for our solidarity with them, inviting us to collect donated blankets and comforters.

So if you have any extra blankets, or would like to buy some for the “Mujeres Mixtecas” coop to distribute, please send them our way!

San Diego Community College Fair Trade Coffee Campaign

Dear San Diego Community College Community,

We would like to invite you to join us in a campaign to fight for Fair Trade coffee at the San Diego Community College.

Click here to sign the fair trade coffee petition.

Every day, hundreds of us purchase a cup of coffee at City College. This is fine—but we believe that the money we pay for that coffee should go to the hard-working farmers who grow and pick that coffee. We should not be drinking coffee that is polluted with the sweat and blood of exploited laborers in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and many other coffee-producing nations. When we buy coffee, our money should go to support worker-owned coops that allow workers and their families to live with dignity and justice. We want to see City College become a campus that only sells coffee with the taste of justice—coffee that is “Fair Trade certified”.

Most of the world’s coffee is controlled by big corporations like Phillip Morris, Nestlé and Sara Lee. These huge companies often pay coffee farmers miserable prices without guaranteeing a stable wage. Farming coffee becomes a gamble: the farmers who invest the most work in our coffee are paid a few pennies, while middlemen and corporate distributers keep the profits for themselves.

Considering all of the violence and injustice involved in the coffee trade, it’s no wonder that many coffee farmers leave their home towns and migrate to the city or to another country. For many, it’s just not possible to survive farming coffee.

But there is another way…

Fair Trade-certified coffee offers a real alternative to the unjust status quo of coffee. Coffee that bears the Fair Trade label was bought from worker-owned co-ops that make decisions democratically and negotiate a fair price for their product.

For two years, the club City College CAFE (Creating Alternatives and Fair Trade) has worked to create awareness about fair trade. We are asking you to support the San Diego Community College Fair Trade Campaign. Our goal is to present a resolution to the District Board of Trustees in favor of fair trade coffee.

We would like to ask you to join us in presenting a resolution to the District Board of Trustees in favor of fair trade coffee.

You can support this campaign in one of these ways:

• Sign the petition for a resolution. (Paper or online)
• Online petition click here: fair trade coffee petition
• Pass out the petition and ask your students, peers, colleagues and friends who are part of the San Diego Community College District to sign the petition.

• Invite CAFE to come to your class to present the petition.

This campaign for Coffee with Justice will not stop until the day that not a single cup of unfairly traded “exploitation coffee” is served at the San Diego Community College District.

In solidarity,

City College C.A.F.E. (Creating Alternative and Fair Enterprise)

Cafeontheborder.blogspot.com

Cafeontheborder@gmail.com

Facebook: CityCAFE

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Resolution on Fair Trade-certified coffee for the San Diego Community College Board of Trustees


Whereas, students, faculty, staff, administration and visitors spend thousands of dollars every year buying coffee in the District cafeterias that is produced mostly in exploitative conditions or extreme poverty and therefore is polluted with the sweat and blood of exploited laborers in Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and many other coffee-producing nations;

Whereas, most of the world’s coffee production is controlled by few companies that often pay coffee farmers extremely low prices without guaranteeing them a stable wage and therefore those farmers who invest the most work in producing coffee are paid a few cents, while middlemen and corporate distributors keep the profits for themselves;

Whereas, because of all the violence and injustice involved in the coffee trade, for many coffee farmers it is just not possible to survive farming coffee, and therefore they are forced to leave their home towns and migrate to the city or to another country, including the US;

Whereas, there is a growing local, national and international awareness for changing our practices and choice of buying coffee that comes from farmers and workers who are justly compensated—and in San Diego, UCSD and USD consume fair-trade certified coffee;

Whereas, Fair Trade-certified coffee offers a real alternative to the unjust status quo of the coffee business and coffee that bears the Fair Trade label guarantees that it was bought from worker-owned co-ops that make decisions democratically and negotiate a fair price for their product;

Whereas, one of the District strategic goals is to “become a sustainability citizen and advocate within the community,” and one of the District practices has been to promote relationships (partnerships) and agreements with local businesses, for example during the construction of new buildings and facilities;

Be it resolved, that only fair trade-certified coffee will be sold in the District cafeterias and facilities and that most of the coffee served in the District will be purchased from local coffee distributors. 

Reflection on Maneadero Trip

Spacial Configurations in Maneadero
By Elizabeth Chaney

"Space depends crucially on the notion of articulation, in terms of the articulation of social relations which necessarily have a spatial form in their interactions with one another." (Doreen Massey, as quoted by Mary Pat Brady. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies. 2002. Duke University Press)

A rectangular pond/echoed/in/corrugated tin.

Los niños/están/jugando fútbol/en la calle polvorienta.

The ball flies/over clay levies/into irrigation water.

Hay un polo de PVC/Next to the pond.

They fish the ball out/every time.

Excepto en un ocasión/pero/piedras pueden ayuda mover el balón del centro.

It’s peculiar/how distant/los cuarteles son del campo/from the road.

Un hora en el camion/every morning/every night.

Hills fade into a patchwork of fields. The highway runs straight as a pole south from Ensenada. It later curves to hug the landscape as topography interrupts the patchwork. Si acuerdo correctamente, los cuarteles son oeste de donde los campos son interrumpidos por topografia.

I remember clearly a roll of bolsas de plastico, frijoles secos. Two scoops is about a pound-it becomes easy to visually approximate weight, after about 20 bags. "¿Cuáles son?" I feel very uncomfortable being blessed for the effort. We fill the shopping cart to the brim.

I'm hyper-aware of the make and condition of vehicle we drive over dusty roads. It's pretty fuel efficient, it's not a good use of time to fret over what the car may signify in this context. And I can't help but think in the same terms about the car I drive.

"But, the more its shown that "the sort of thing which happens in that place" is partly an outcome of policies designed in this place, the more responsibility we have to do something about it...There is a need, as Susan Sontag once said, to put privilege and suffering on the same map." (Nally, David. "Architectures of Violence: Famine and Profits." Al Jazeera. 2011. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201181492658224754.html.)

The notion of privilege, I think, has to be wrestled with to avoid rendering it immobile. Its "inflexibility" can seem implicit in the notion of "charity," which depends on a unquestioned verticality of social relationships that extends moral privilege to the resource-privileged. It is, thus, an interesting predicament, when charity serves as a guise to initiate relationships based en horizontalidad. Shouldn't structural conditions that ensure verticality (i.e. polar conditions of resource access) be challenged (opposed) directly?

This is certainly one approach, which edges on allopathy. The basis of Modern Western medicine (i.e. introduce a factor that counters symptoms to attack the ailment), the allopathic approach is effective in sudden crises, but potentially sustains maladies of a more subtle variety. Might the appropriation-subversion of one mechanism that provides ideological backing for the verticality we aim to challenge provide an entry toward addressing structural violence behind conditions weathered by migrant workers?

Perhaps only when subversion of the mechanism runs its course. That is, when "charity" is twisted to serve simply as a means of initiating equitable relationships that may develop over time.

Trip to Maneadero

Recently CAFE members took a weekend trip to Maneadero, Baja California where they experienced firsthand the effects of “free trade”, NAFTA and the hidden cost of a cheap tomato. They brought humanitarian donations (food, vitamins, medical supplies) for the migrant laborers who work on the industrial farms, harvesting the vegetables that fill supermarkets in the U.S. Visiting various encampments where the migrant workers live, they saw the poverty that is created and reinforced by lopsided trade agreements and exploitative labor practices. Most of these workers are of the indigenous Mixtec ethnicity—unable to survive in their hometowns of southern Mexico, they face discrimination and marginalization in northern Mexico where they come to work on these “factory farms”. These “agro-maquiladoras” mirror the massive assembly line factories that dot the landscape near the border.

Participants learned about the economic and political forces that have created this situation, pushing Mixtec men, women and children north to labor in brutal conditions. In addition to visiting the encampments on the farms, visited an orphanage in Maneadero that provides care to the children of the farm workers who are born with birth defects. Back in Tijuana, they visited a group of Mixtec women in the Tijuana neighborhood of Valle Verde who have formed their own sewing coop as an alternative source of income.



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