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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CAFE On Your TV!

Check out this video from "Progress in San Diego", as David Schmidt, from CAFE discusses fair trade:

Voices of a Mountain - Guatamala

Follow-up Strategy Session - Fair Trade in San Diego

We will be having a follow-up strategy session to the Fair Trade Session at the Border Studies Conference to continue to discuss how we can work together, as organizations and individuals, to push for Fair Trade and fight unfair trade at a local and national level. This strategy session will be an open conversation between all of us, to further discuss what we can do together to coordinate with each other and push to expand Fair Trade.

We are planning on holding it at San Diego City College Building A, Room 213 on Saturday March 19, 2011 at 10:30 a.m.

For more information, please email cafeontheborder@gmail.com.

Migration and Coffee in Mexico and Central America

To Die a Little

By LUIS HERNANDEZ NAVARRO

Counterpunch, Dec 2004

Go to note

Reyno Bartolo Hernández died of heatstroke in the Arizona desert near Yuma on May 22, 2001. He wasn't the only Mexican farmer who lost his life that day trying to cross the border. Thirteen of his countrymen and -women perished along with him in one more of the migratory tragedies of modern history.

Reyno and his companions were small coffee growers from the township of Atzalan, Veracruz. Atzalan is a formerly rich region but in recent years it has been impoverished by senseless policies. Until just a few years ago, few of its residents migrated to the United States. Then the price of coffee fell, and so did the price of citrus fruits and cattle. To make matters worse, bananas were attacked by fruit flies and the coffee crop was overcome by a devastating plant disease.

So little by little, the inhabitants of Atzalan set out along the route blazoned by small farmers from the states of Michoacan, Zacatecas, and Jalisco decades earlier. The coffee farmers began to look for a way to cross the 3,107-kilometer border that separated them from the United States, hoping to get to "the other side." In desperation, they hooked up with the infamous polleros, the smugglers who led them to their deaths.

Thomas Navarrete, long-time adviser to the cooperative that many Atzalan growers belong to, notes that the crisis in the region is dramatic and tragic. In many communities, around 70% of the residents have left, most to the United States. Navarrete points out that before people didn't need to leave their communities, at least not like now. "Even Celso Rodríguez, the president of the cooperative, left to work in Arizona," he says.

The border has become a magnet for these coffee growers. If they get over--and many do--they earn $4-5 an hour, compared to the less than $4 a day they earn at home, if they're lucky. In the coffee communities, the success stories from the other side are impressive. Migrants come back and remodel their houses; they pour a new roof, replace wooden planks with concrete blocks. Everyone can see and envy the changes.

Apple's 2011 Supplier Report Reveals Child Workers, Bribes, Unsafe Conditions

After ten suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn last year, Apple has published a review of supplier responsibility practices, which reported child labor violations, toxic conditions, and other violations of their code of conduct.

Apple sent COO Tim Cook to Foxconn, where a team of suicide prevention specialists had been dispatched to deal with the issues there. "The team commended Foxconn for taking quick action on several fronts simultaneously, including hiring a large number of psychological counselors, establishing a 24-hour care center, and even attaching large nets to the factory buildings to prevent impulsive suicides," the report said, going on to conclude that "Foxconn's response had definitely saved lives."

Apple's response to the suicides at Foxconn has garnered significant media attention over the past year, but Apple did not cut ties with the factory. According to their recent report, they did cut ties with a number of other factories violating their code, including one company that tried to bribe Apple officials to overlook violations, another that falsified payroll records, and one with over 90 underage workers.

Apple continues to work with several other facilities employing child labor, who have promised to work with Apple to prevent future underage workers. For those facilities found to be employing workers under 16, China's legal labor age, Apple is forcing the supplier to pay for educational expenses and lost wages for 6 months or until the worker turns 16, whichever is longer.

"During our investigation, we also discovered that the vocational school involved in hiring the
underage workers had falsified student IDs and threatened retaliation against students who revealed their ages during our audits," the report went on to say. "We reported the school to appropriate authorities in the Chinese government."

Apple also discovered a facility that endangered their workers by exposing them to n-hexane, a chemical that reportedly left some workers unable to walk. "We required the facility to discontinue use of n-hexane, to fix the factory's ventilation systems," Apple said of the discovery.

Additionally, Apple found that less than a third of reviewed factories complied with the company's standards for working hours, which are a maximum of 60 hours a week. The company is working to improve management and oversight over these issues. Read the full report here.

The Huffington Post  Amy Lee  First Posted: 02/15/11 12:52 PM Updated: 02/15/11 04:03 PM