Johnny Hazard : Tanks Versus Teachers in Mexico City

Striking teachers at Zócalo plaza in Mexico City, Friday, September 13, 2013. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

Tanks vs. teachers:
Federal police drive striking teachers
from Mexico's Zócalo plaza

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"In addition to promoting just causes and altering business as usual for awhile (and hoping that such alterations will be permanent), marches, rallies, highway blockages, and the collective taking of public spaces, but especially encampments and occupations, re-establish community and the liberating collective creativity that has been lost amid urban chaos." -- Armando Bartra, Mexican left intellectual

"Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexican president, doesn't know how his first wife died, can't name three books that have shaped his life, and can't name the capital city of the state of Veracruz, yet he's ready to evaluate teachers!" -- Sign on a tent at the teachers' encampment

MEXICO CITY -- 3,500 federal police, with their tanks and water cannons and joined by hundreds of the “progressive” police of Mexico City, expelled thousands of teachers, members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (dissident caucus but, today, the de facto teachers' union in Mexico) from the central plaza, the Zócalo, on Friday, September 13.

Violence, according to government and mainstream media, was limited, but images of 12 police attacking one woman have been widely distributed. In other times or other places, or with other actors, this may have been the end of the story: another social movement smothered.

But the teachers have not gone far. Many are in the plaza of the Monumento de la Revolución, about a mile away. And the level of public support for the teachers is much greater since the police action. Students at most of the campuses of all the public universities in the city, including technical schools and teachers' colleges, have voted in assemblies to shut down campuses and join in actions to support the teachers.

Police drive teachers from the plaza Monday. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

They are staffing the kitchens at the encampment and arrived on short notice for a candlelight march on Saturday night and for a much bigger march on Sunday night that culminated in an alternative Independence Day celebration.

The federal police attack on teachers had, perhaps, two main objectives:

1. To support the governments's bogus education reform that stems from the premise that teachers are to blame for whatever is wrong with education and with youth. (A movie called Panzazo, styled after Waiting for Superman, was funded by the corporate elite and served as the first shot by the other side in this battle.)


2. To open up the plaza for Independence Day celebrations tonight and tomorrow. It's a strange ritual in which hundreds of thousands of apolitical, mostly drunk people fill the square, shoot fireworks at other people, spray foam on people who don't want it, and listen to the president shout "Viva México" at a time when Mexico's lack of independence in the face of U.S., Canadian, and Spanish corporations has never been more severe. Television coverage of the event appears more stately, emphasizing pomp and circumstance inside the presidential palace (which faces the Zócalo), and muting the noise of the crowd.

This year was Peña Nieto's first Independence Day in office and images abound of his promenading with his new wife, a soap opera star. His relationship with her became public very soon after the mysterious death of his first wife. When he was still a state governor, he had a multi-million-dollar publicity contract with Televisa, the largest television network. It's common here for politicians to literally buy the media with taxpayer funds, but Peña Nieto has taken the concept to a new level.

The teachers and their supporters are now organizing -- gathering food, tarps, tents, and clothes -- to withstand extreme rains. (Normally in this season, it rains for a while every day in the late afternoon, but, since Friday, it's been raining most of the time as very severe tropical storms have hit both coasts. Guerrero, home to some of the most hell-raising teachers, is especially hard-hit, with damage exacerbated by systemic negligence. In Acapulco and Chilpancingo, and more in smaller communities, there is no running water, telephone, transportation, or Internet service.)

This week has seen marches every day and most of the local universities remain in active shutdown till Friday. Much of the coverage of the strike in the U.S. media, it should be noted, has been inaccurate or misleading, or often virtually nonexistent.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.

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Johnny Hazard : Mexico City Rocked by Massive Teacher Protest

Teachers mobilize in Mexico City, Wednesday, September 4, 2013. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

Militant teachers' strike:
Massive protests continue in Mexico

The actions were a continuation of protests against an education 'reform' package first passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2013 

MEXICO CITY -- Thousands of teachers, mostly members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), remain camped out in the center of Mexico City after having initiated a series of protests that have included blocking the airport for a day, blockades at the two major television networks in demand for equal time (they received three and five minutes, respectively), and marches that have forced the closure of various major thoroughfares and Metro stations.

Massive marches took place on Sunday, September 1, and Wednesday, September 4. The actions were a continuation of protests against an education "reform" package passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.

There were also actions in other parts of Mexico including an hour-long shutdown of the border bridge by teachers in Juárez. A demonstration by teachers in Los Cabos blocked the airport there.

The actions of the CNTE do not represent, numerically, the biggest demonstrations in recent Mexican history, but have proven to be the strongest; the anti-election fraud movements of 2006 and 2012, and the militant protests after 45,000 electricians were arbitrarily fired by the federal government in 2009, pale in comparison.

Federal police mobilize in response to militant teachers' action on Wednesday, September 4. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

With the protests of Chicago teachers this year and last, the demonstrations in Mexico City represent the most significant resistance to big-business-based education reform thus far.

September 1 is, by law, the day the president delivers his annual report ("informe," similar to the State of the Union address). This year, the teachers planned to interrupt it or block roads leading to the Congress, so the president postponed his presentation until the next day, Monday, and had his top cabinet official hand over the written report to the Congress.

There was a march of about 50,000 teachers, with numbers disproportionately from Oaxaca. Since there were thousands of police and soldiers awaiting them at the Congress building, they began marching instead toward the presidential palace  Less than halfway, the rank and file (especially, again, those from Oaxaca) -- after receiving news that the Congress had already begun meeting to pass a remaining set of "reforms" that day -- demanded to go to the Congress.

So the marchers turned back towards the Congress building. As they got closer, some in the crowd -- many of them not teachers -- got into confrontations with police. There were a few arrests of "ultra" protesters -- including young urban "anarquistas" as well as bystanders and independent reporters. Most of these arrests occurred  miles from the original march route, as the police had surrounded marchers and forced them to a distant location.

A group of 30 police horses were spooked by loud noise when officers took them out of their trailers near the Congress building and they stampeded through downtown Mexico City, causing quite a stir and substantial damage, especially to cars.in their paths, and a number of horses were injured as a result.

Monday and Tuesday, the Senate met to approve the reforms. Several Metro stations and at least three major avenues were closed all day -- by the cops, not by the protesters -- an example of how the ostensibly leftist city government is cooperating with its federal allies, in this case by creating traffic problems and blaming the teachers.

Wednesday brought a 24-hour work stoppage by teachers, including many in Mexico City, and a massive "insurgent mobilization." Again, about 50,000 teachers and supporters gathered at the national auditorium, near the presidential residence, leading to speculation that the plan was to surround and shut down the residence, known as "Los Pinos."

Demonstrators rally in Mexico City on Wednesday. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

But, perhaps because President Enrique Peña Nieto left Tuesday for the G-20 summit in Russia, the marchers instead headed toward other federal office buildings. After hours during which a group of teachers' representatives were inside negotiating with low-level government officials, the marchers were still on the streets, in the rain, blocking a stretch of "the most beautiful avenue in Latin America," Paseo de la Reforma -- and were making plans to return to their encampment and launch similar actions on Thursday, including the possibility of a nationwide work stoppage.

Tens of thousands of teachers in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca are already on strike. Teachers -- who have been disproportionately blamed for students' low academic achievement -- are demanding that they be evaluated by means other than simple standardized tests and that, in turn, president Peña Nieto and the television networks also be evaluated.

Among the non-teacher participants Wednesday were a girl of about five years old with a T shirt that read, "Today I didn't go to school. I came here to defend public education" and hundreds of women from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca in their bright red traditional dresses.

Peña Nieto's annual report -- echoed constantly in advertising paid for by the government to promote its agenda -- promised 120 days of major transformations in Mexico. That is probably true, but it remains to be seen whether the changes will be the ones that he has in mind.

Representatives of the CNTE have announced their intention to stay in Mexico City at least until Sunday, September 8, to participate in a rally organized by opposition political leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the privatization of the petroleum industry, and it is likely that they will try to hold out until September 16 to impede official Independence Day celebrations that take place every year in the Zócalo (central square) of Mexico City, exactly where the CNTE has its enormous tent city installed.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.

The demonstrators included young urban "anarchistas." Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

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Johnny Hazard : Militant Teachers Block Mexico City Airport

Teachers shut down airport in Mexico City. Photos by Jesús Villaseca for The Rag Blog

Protesting radical education 'reforms':
Militant teachers block Mexico City airport

The action was part of a series of escalating protests against the passage, without discussion, of an education 'reform' package in the Congress in the first day of the term of new president Enrique Peña Nieto.

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2013

MEXICO CITY -- Thousands of teachers (7,000, according to detractors, more according to organizers), members of a dissident caucus within the dominant Mexican teachers union, blocked access to the Mexico City airport for about 11 hours on Friday, July 23.

The action was part of a series of escalating protests against the passage, without discussion, of an education "reform" package in the Congress in the first day of the term of new president Enrique Peña Nieto, inaugurated in December amid charges of electoral fraud.

News reports have focused more on passengers' and airline employees' lamentations about inconvenience than about the teachers' demands. One newspaper carried the complaints of a flight attendant who hurt her feet because she had to walk a mile or two to the airport in high heels, as if her unfortunate choice of footwear were the teachers' fault.

Teachers were about to enter and shut down the airport when some of their leaders paused, negotiated with authorities, and decided to limit the action to a blockade of all roads that lead to the airport (a highway and several major thoroughfares). This, while disappointing some of the more avid participants, still had the effect of forcing the delay or cancellation of most flights.

Protesters at airport.

The week of intense protests started when the Congress was to begin a special session to pass legislation that would enable the reform measures, which include more standardized testing for students and teachers and a fast-track route to fire teachers in violation of collective bargaining agreements.

Media, business, and government leaders here tend to blame teachers for the low academic achievement of students who attend school only a few hours every day in schools with peeling paint, crumbling walls, no running water, soap, toilet paper, or nutritious food, and a teacher shortage (not for lack of applicants) that creates class sizes of 40 or 50 in the early grades. In rural areas it is common for teachers to appear only via closed circuit television.

Teachers surrounded the lower house of the Congress and forced the legislators to try to meet in the senate chambers. When that didn't work, legislators went to a business conference center in a distant suburb. The Congress has yet to vote these proposals which, if not for the protests, the dissidents believe would have been voted immediately and without discussion.

Manuel Pérez Rocha, education critic and retired university administrator, wrote recently in La Jornada newspaper about the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), the dissident caucus:

The CNTE is not perfect, but it is a reality that is separate from the vice-ridden Mexican political system: It is not a party, nor a sect, nor an economic interest group. It is a "movement" with two basic objectives: the democratization of the SNTE (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, the mainstream teachers' union) and education reform. The latter is not possible without the former.

Francisco Nicolás Bravo is general secretary of Section 9 of the SNTE. Located in Mexico City, Section 9 has always been a hotbed of the dissidents, so much so that the national leadership doesn't recognize the local's officials and stages mock elections to put more loyal leaders in office. Bravo, therefore, doesn't benefit from the reduction of class load that logically is granted to teachers' union leaders everywhere. His work in Section 9 and in the CNTE is in addition to his full-time school assignment.

National police gather.

He speaks of a campaign, complete with a movie that imitates Waiting for Superman ("De panzazo"), to convince the public that recalcitrant teachers are against being evaluated. "The question," he says, "is what kind of evaluation are we talking about? Because we're in favor of an evaluation that is holistic, not partial -- formative evaluations, not punitive evaluations."

He calls the government's project "labor and administrative reform, not education reform" and notes that it eliminates all possibility for a fired teacher to appeal his or her dismissal: "Even a delinquent -- we need only look at the case of Caro Quintero -- has the right to legal defense." (Caro Quintero is an accused drug trafficker convicted of the murder of a DEA agent who was unexpectedly freed from prison a few weeks ago.)

This week, teachers continue to occupy the Zócalo, the central square of Mexico City, and decide whether to participate in the negotiations agreed to during the blockade of the airport. Many rank and file members are opposed because they believe the government will not dialogue in good faith.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

Also see Shirley Youxjeste's earlier Rag Blog reports from Guerrero on the Mexican teachers' protests.

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Michael James : 'El Lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, 1962

'El lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, August 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
'El lechero' in San Miguel, 1962

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street... I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I’m riding in the back seat of a 1957 Plymouth, heading to Acapulco on a weekend adventure. Cliffs on the mountainside act as pages in the "People’s Book," catching my attention. Giant messages say: “¡Capitalismo No! ¡Comunismo Si! ¡Viva Castro!” I heard in one of my anthropology classes about leftist guerillas controlling portions of Guerrero, the state we’re riding in.

The car belongs to the Delamarter twins out of Michigan, Larry and Lou. Also on the ride are Bob Marks and a guy named Zeke from Long Island. I credit these four with introducing me to the wilder side of new things I experienced in Mexico.

In Acapulco there’s drinking at a back-street cantina where a little pimp, speaking a few words in five languages, introduces a parade of women. There is a party on a docked sailboat, where the Jamaican captain is very rude to the women he’s invited.

On a more wholesome adventure, we head south of Acapulco to a non-tourist beach, for a great swim in the Pacific. Older women sit on an old boat. A campesino couple is walking the beach. An old man is asleep in a hammacca.

I see Afro-Mexican kids, reflecting the slave economy of earlier times. Years later I will learn the extent to which African slaves were brought to Mexico and Central and South America. And later I will also learn that Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, long before it was abolished in the USA.

Early Sunday morning in Acapulco, at dawn, I’m awakened from a short night’s sleep by the barking of dogs, followed by the earth rumbling and the building shaking. Whoa! It’s short and then it’s over: my first earthquake.

On yet another occasion with the same four fellows, plus another gringo and three Mexican theater types, I take a Saturday trip to San Miguel de Allende. An artists’ colony with a long-running expatriate presence, San Miguel is about 175 northwest of Mexico City. Once a battleground between the Dominican and Franciscan religious orders, there are churches everywhere.

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street after an apparent night out. Lots of burros, little beasts of burden, are loaded with bundles on their backs. An old man pulls a small cart, watched by a group of laughing Mexican teenagers modernos. What a contrast. I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

Other new friends I meet at the Mex-Ci-Co apartamentos include Jack and Donna Traylor, and Jim Darby, who years later would become a Chicago public school teacher. Jim, an ex-sailor, had ridden the smallest model Honda motorcycle all the way from Chicago. Part of the trip his brother was riding on back, getting out of town after being shot in the leg.

I would see Jim just once back in Chicago, but after then was never able to find him -- that is, until I saw him in 2013 while watching public TV. Jim and his boyfriend were the focus of a story about how they are suing my pal David Orr, the Cook County Clerk, over the right to marry in Illinois. Wow. I ended up contacting him and having him on our Live from the Heartland radio show.

Jack Traylor was an Okie, his family part of the Grapes of Wrath migration that moved from Oklahoma to California in the late 1930’s. He and Donna were schoolteachers and graduate students. And Jack sang beautiful versions of Woody Guthrie songs. He has my favorite voice ever.

In the early 1960’s in San Jose, California, Jack taught Paul Kantner guitar riffs. Later in the 60’s he played with the Gateway Singers and toured the nation’s folk clubs. In the 70’s, his own group, Steele Wind, put out an album on Grunt. The Jefferson Airplane “stole” guitarist Craig Chaquico from Steel Wind. Jack wrote some tunes for Jefferson Airplane, and was the link that brought the Airplane to the Heartland Café 40-odd years later.

Jack and Donna have a VW camper. I ride around with them, and they are the closest thing to parental figures I have in Mexico. They look out for me. Once Jack throws me into the van and speeds off. We’d been drinking at the Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, a place full of bars, mariachi bands, and putas.

A well-dressed young Mexican with a smile asks me -- an inebriated, not-very-bilingual gringo — ¿Como se gusta tipico Mexico? How do I like typical Mexico? Thinking he means the bar we’ve been in, where solicitation for sex is constant, I say No me gusta, demasiado putas, “I don’t like, too many whores” -- whereupon Jack immediately shoves me into the van; an embarrassing episode to this day.

Mexico City. Wow! What a place. Years later I would become friends with the late, great leftist writer John Ross, who was a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and whose El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City covers the city’s dynamic history from early on.

My activities in La Ciudad that summer of ’62 include eating out, drinking, lifting weights at a Mexican version of a Vic Tanny gym, going to museums, taking classes, reading, writing letters, shopping, and getting the Triumph repaired. And I discover Sanborns.

Sanborns was a lunch counter/soda fountain operation similar to Howard Johnsons in the States. I meet a waitress there, a pretty counter girl in a tan uniform, little hat, and white apron. Getting my courage up, I make a return visit and ask if she would like to go on a date, go see a movie. And she accepts.

So, wearing a sport jacket and driving the Delamarter boys' 1957 Plymouth wagon, I venture into a maze of unpaved back streets, getting lost in el barrio. Eventually I find her family’s small adobe home, indistinct from hundreds of others. I go to the door and she greets me -- with the information that her father won’t permit her to go on the date. She says she is sorry. So am I.

At a party one night at the apartment complex, I am sharing a joint: la mota, la marijauna. I remember seeing this far-out, amazing golden waterfall as I take a piss. In the morning I wake up sick. Really sick. Very sick.

Yellow jaundus, hepititis. I’ve got it. It’s got me. Over the course of the next few days, through one of my dad’s connections (who he had repeatedly asked me to contact) --  I end up in the American British Cowdray Hospital. I stay there for 19 days. A benefit is eating big, part of the comeback.

While I am recovering I read a book filled with oddities about Mexico, called A Mexican Medley for the Curious. I read Kerouac’s On the Road. In posession of a portable Olivetti typewriter and probably influenced by Jack’s adventures, I write of my little Mexican adventures. I reference politics, drinking, women, and drugs.

A Panamanian nurse who speaks English and has been very friendly asks if she can read it; I say sure. When she returns a few days later, she hands back my would-be manuscript and leaves without a word, never to return. What? First glimmer of lessons I continue to learn.

For the short remainder of the summer I live with the Delamarter brothers who have moved to a modern apartment off the Carretera Mexico Toluca north of Mexico City College. A general lives next door. We never see him, but we do see his wife -- glamorous and modern, a bourgiois woman. Her two small boys come to play; other kids from the neighborhood come around too, checking out the gringos. The sexy neighbor wife has some Afghan hounds and, grinning, looks at us young fellows and asks, “You like my dogs?” Ay-yi-yi.

And then it’s time. Trecking north and back to school, I’m on the Triumph, following the gang of four in the Plymouth. We ride through San Luis Potosi, then the desert and Sautillo, and stop for the night in Monterrey. The next day we ride into dusk, heading to Nuevo Laredo during the night. Suddenly around a curve there are lights: a carnival, people enjoying a festive event. I shoot the picture. We move on, cross the border, and sleep in Laredo on the state side of the Rio Bravo, the Rio Grande.

In the morning we find a bike shop and I arrange to leave the Triumph to be shipped. Post-hepititis, I had been told not to ride the bike. But because Mexican law does not permit me to sell it; if I want to keep it I have to drive it out of the country, doctor's advice or not.

Then we cross back into Mexico, into Neuevo Laredo for a last-time look around. We walk through the red-light disctrict at noon, observing an abundance of women on the stoops of small shacks, their hair up in curlers.

The gang of four leaves me off at my college girlfriend Lucia’s new family home in Morton, outside Chicago. Her dad and I compete to see who can eat the most jalapeño peppers. A day later I’m hitchiking to Connecticut, somehow via the New York Thruway. A band of Gypsies picks me up in a beater Cadillac convertible. They ask if I have money. “No... I wouldn’t be hitchiking if I had money.”

Late that night I am pretty miserable, sleep-deprived, sort of hallucinating while waiting for a ride near Batavia, New York. I make it home to Connecticut sometime the next day and sleep till the day after that.

It’s good to be home. I talk with my dad. He tells me of his job in a fish cannery in Alaska back in the 1920’s, and lets me know that he had smoked marijauna then. He does encourage me not to smoke it every day.

Against my wishes, Dad had been editing and compiling my letters into what he called "The Mexican Oddyessy of Senior Miguel Gaylord James," then sending mimeographed copies to family and friends. Years later I am grateful to have that tamed-down version of my summer in Mexico.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Fading Away: JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

JFK with Mexican President Lopez Mateos in Mexico City, July 29, 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Fading away: 
JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

At the time I was a Kennedy fan... I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The run from Victoria, Texas, to Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capitol, on my Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle, was about 450 miles, 700 kilometros. That’s where I ended up, and where I checked into an old hotel. My room off the second floor balcony had a big bed and a big overhead fan, a good hot shower, and plenty of bugs on the ceiling in the night.

Out on the streets I watched a crowd gather around a gray-haired woman, a man in a straw cowboy hat, and a policeman. I didn’t know what it was about. After I shot a few pictures I was approached by an older fellow; he spoke English and we talked for a time. He had lived and worked in Chicago years earlier... said he once had a 1947 Harley.

I walked and looked around. People were friendly. I was offered the affectionate services of women for $2 -- offers I graciously declined, declaring I was too tired.

My first meal in Mexico was chosen by indicating to the waiter, el mesero, that I would have the same fare that someone at another table was eating. It turned out to be cabrito, baby goat. It was delicious. I washed it down with a Carta Blanca that cost 16 cents.

Awakening in the night, I went to the window and used my best español to ask someone in the gas station below what time it was. I heard doce -- midnight -- but I took it for dos, two. Figuring to get a jump on my ride to Mexico City, “dos” seemed good. I loaded up, gased up, and was ready to roll before I realized the correct time. With an extra two-hour jump, my ride now spanned the end of a night and the dawning of a new day.

A misty dawn and I was in a mountain town, smelling unique jungle scents, and the diesel fumes of buses and trucks. There I heard for the first time the early morning pat-pat-pat of women making tortillas. I shot a picture of my trusty steed parked in the middle of the road, in the middle of the town, with no one around. It was still. It was quiet. I soaked it in.

During the night out on the highway I had barely missed the rump of a caballo that was on the road seeking warmth. I had seen some campesinos muy borrachos staggering on the roadside, and, after following a bus for better lighting, had ended up in a dirt wash while navigating a turn near Ciudad Valles.

I had also pulled up to a rural cantina and dancehall, gotten off the bike, stretched out, and walked into the club. My entrance had eyes looking at me -- blond, 210, 6’ 2” -- wearing a gray leather welding jacket, black jeans, and jet boots. I ordered a refresco from the bar, drank it slowly, and nodded at numerous folks before saddling up and rumbling off into the night.

The Sunday ride south was “far out,” amazing and magical for this 20-year-old gringo del Norte. I rode above, below, and in the clouds. Along the side of the road there was an ongoing parade of Indians carrying sticks, pigs, turkeys, bundled-this and bundled-that, goods I did not yet know about.

I passed a scraggly group of peasants standing at attention, led in drill by a man in a scruffy uniform who waved as I rode by. And when I stopped, camera in hand, on the mountain’s edge, I decided not to “capture the spirit” of two Indians sitting on a wall with their machetes when they turned away from me.

Closer to Mexico City there were more mountains, more horses, burros and carts, more cars, buses and trucks, small towns, and all manner of roadside activity. And there were hundreds and hundreds of fellows riding European bikes. Bicycles. They were all wearing colorful tight-fitting riding outfits, grouped in packs, creating a rainbow effect. This bike scene was way new to me. I was the product of the fat-wheeled American bicycle era, a la J.C. Higgins and Schwinn, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

By mid-afternoon I reached kilometro 16 up on the Carretera Mexico Toluca highway, 7,000 feet above sea level, 76 hours after leaving Lucia and central Illinois. I was there, at Mexico City College, planning to study, to see, to learn new things; and I intend to have a good time.

I took notice of the beatnik types, the early hippies, as well as straighter preppie types. Huaraches and woolen Indian sweaters were popular with all. I fell in with an interesting collection of gringo types living at the Mex-Ci-Co Apartments, and with people I met at school. All of them were older than me. I was, in fact, the young kid, being introduced to new and different things. That was my good fortune.

In my new world, Mexico summer 1962, these adventures included trips to the Museo Nacional de Arte, the central market, getting too drunk at a bar called Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, climbing the pyramid at San Juan Teotihuacán, hitting the Toluca Thursday market, more climbing at las ruinas outside Toluca, and other trips out of town.

It also included discovering mangos, visiting eating establishments, hitting the Saturday night into Sunday morning after-hours dance halls, and going to the bullfights. And it also included drinking in the grand lobby of a palatial whorehouse, where I chatted with a very big and very black Cuban pro wrestler. Oh, and there was the discovery of la marijuana, the sacred weed. Hallelujah!

Twelve days after I showed up in Mexico City, so did President John F. Kennedy. He was attempting to bolster the U.S.’s role in Latin America via the Alliance for Progress. At the time I was a Kennedy fan, especially of his inspirational exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I saw walls covered with anti-USA and anti-Kennedy graffiti. I photographed a man on a corner, and was able to discern the scrubbed-out words “Kennedy Largate” -- “Kennedy get out” -- on the wall behind him. My political awakening was continuing.

On July 29, 1962, an excited crowd lined the Paseo de la Reforma to catch a view of Kennedy in a confetti parade. I was there and shot two photos of Kennedy riding in an open air Mercedes with Mexican President Lopez Mateos. In the first one, which I call “Commotion in the Motorcade,” the secret service guys, riding behind Kennedy in a Cadillac convertible, are turned right and looking back. The motorcycle in front of the Mercedes had just hit someone who came too far out into the road.

That happened perhaps 20 yards to my right. I cocked my camera, immediately shooting again, catching a slightly blurred JFK who was directly in front of me. The vehicles had been moving fast, and after hours of buildup, the moment had come and gone. I took it easy, moving through the crowd, back to the Triumph and up the mountain to my Mex-Ci-Co abode, to eat, read Sons of the Shaking Earth, and reflect on some fading ways of looking at the world.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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David Bacon : From 'Planton' to Occupy

Banners at Occupy Seattle. Photo by David Bacon / The Rag Blog.
From planton to Occupy:
Unions, immigrants, and the Occupy movement

By David Bacon / Truthout / November 6, 2011

OAKLAND, California -- When Occupy Seattle called its tent camp "Planton Seattle," camp organizers were laying a local claim to a set of tactics used for decades by social movements in Mexico, Central America, and the Philippines.

And when immigrant janitors marched down to the detention center in San Diego and called their effort Occupy ICE (the initials of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency responsible for mass deportations), people from countries with that planton tradition were connecting it to the Occupy movement here.

This shared culture and history offer new possibilities to the Occupy movement for survival and growth at a time when the Federal law enforcement establishment, in cooperation with local police departments and municipal governments, has uprooted many tent encampments.

Different Occupy groups from Wall Street to San Francisco have begun to explore their relationship with immigrant social movements in the U.S., and to look more closely at the actions of the 1% beyond our borders that produces much of the pressure for migration.

Reacting to the recent evictions, the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad recently sent a support letter to Occupy Wall Street and the other camps under attack. "We greet your movement," it declared, "because your struggle against the suppression of human rights and against social and economic injustice has been a fundamental part of our struggle, that of the Mexican people who cross borders, and the millions of Mexican migrants who live in the United States."

Many of those migrants living in the U.S. know the tradition of the planton and how it's used at home. And they know that the 1%, whose power is being challenged on Wall Street, also designed the policies that are the very reason why immigrants are living in the U.S. to begin with.

Mike Garcia, president of United Service Workers West/SEIU, the union that organized Occupy ICE, described immigrant janitors as "displaced workers of the new global economic order, an order led by the West and the United States in particular."

Criminalizing the act of camping out in a public space is intended, at least in part, to keep a planton tradition from acquiring the same legitimacy in the U.S. that it has in other countries. That right to a planton was not freely conceded by the rulers of Mexico, El Salvador, or the Philippines, however -- no more than it has been conceded here. The 99% of those countries had to fight for it.

Two of the biggest battles of modern Mexican political history were fought in the Tlatelolco Plaza, where hundreds of students were gunned down in 1968, and three years later in Mexico City streets where more were beaten and shot by the paramilitary Halcones.

In both El Salvador and the Philippines, strikers have a tradition of living at the gates of the factory or enterprise where they work. But even today that right must be defended against the police, and (at least until the recent election of the Funes and Aquino governments) even the military.

Plantons or encampments don't stand alone. They are tactics used by unions, students, farmers, indigenous organizations, and other social movements. Each planton is a visible piece of a movement or organization -- a much larger base. When the plantons are useful to those movements, they defend them. That connection between planton and movement, between the encampment and its social base, is as important as holding the physical space on which the tents are erected.


For the last two years that relationship has been very clear in the Zocalo, Mexico City's huge central plaza. During that time, fired members of Mexico's independent left-wing electrical workers union, the SME, have lived in a succession of plantons. They've often been elaborate, with kitchens, meeting rooms, and communications centers, in addition to the tents where people slept and ate.

At various times, the SME encampment was one of several in the huge square. A year ago the workers were joined by indigenous Triqui and Mixtec women from Oaxaca, who protested the violence used by their state's previous governor against teachers' strikes and rural organizations.

The social movement in Oaxaca, which the women represented in Mexico City, grew strong enough to finally knock the old ruling party, the PRI, from the governorship it had held for almost 80 years.

In the Zocalo plantons, people from different organizations mix it up. Last September's Day of the Indignant brought together people from very diverse movements. Some see electoral politics as a vehicle for change, but many indigenous activists and SME members don't. Even among those who do, there are deep disagreements over how to participate in the electoral process.

But the people in the Zocalo have two things in common. Different plantons may not see every political question eye-to-eye, but each represents a social movement in the world outside the plaza. And the planton itself has value primarily because it forces public attention to focus on the crisis that has led each group to set up its encampment.

The SME workers used their plantons to dramatize repression by the Federal government. When Mexican President Felipe Calderon dissolved the state-run power company for central Mexico and fired its 44,000 employees, he sought to destroy their union and move towards the privatization of the electrical system -- to benefit Mexican and foreign 1%ers.

A year ago, several SME members conducted a hunger strike at the planton that generated front page headlines for weeks, and lasted so long that doctors warned participants they were risking death. At the height of the protest, the union battled police in front of the power stations, as it tried to exercise its legal right to strike and picket.

The planton and the movement outside it were intimately connected. The hunger strikers were few, but spoke for a union of tens of thousands of workers. In the end, the SME negotiated the removal of its last planton in return for government acknowledgement of its right to exist. It organized other unions to resist the government's assault on labor rights, and mobilized electricity consumers to protest rising bills and cuts in service. The planton helped to focus attention on these demands, and to pull the union's allies into action.

Clearly someone in Seattle knows this tradition of plantons in the Zocalo, perhaps even as a participant. When the painter made the Seattle banner, she or he also included, right next to the word "planton," the anarchists' "A" with the circle around it. This symbol was a reminder of another aspect of cross-border fertilization. Many anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists -- members of the Industrial Workers of the World -- fought in the Mexican Revolution.

Because of that revolutionary upheaval, even today, almost a century later, ordinary Mexicans expect certain rights, including the right to set up a tent in the Zocalo. U.S. workers crossed the border to fight alongside Mexicans in that insurrection long ago, for a government that would acknowledge that right. The planton, therefore, is a common heritage, with a history that makes it as legitimate on Wall Street as it is in Mexico City.

Not long after the OWS camp was set up in Zuccotti Park, the planton/occupy movement crossed the U.S./Mexico border. In Tijuana, home to a million people, mostly displaced migrants from Mexico's south, activists came together and set up an occupation on the grassy median of the Paseo de los Heroes.

Their tents were pitched in the middle of the Zona del Rio, where the city's 1% meet in fancy hotels and work in government offices. Then, on October 18 police reacted even earlier than they did in most U.S. cities, arresting two dozen activists at the urging of local businessmen. Occupy Tijuana condemned the detentions, declaring, "We are not assassins, delinquents, tramps, or crooks."

Leobardo Benitez Alvarez. a fired SME member, in the union's planton. Photo by David Bacon.

In the U.S. we have our own history of defending public space for protest, and it isn't necessary to reach back a hundred years to find it. In just the last few decades, immigrant workers have popularized the use of the planton here, helping unions recover the militant tactics of their own past.

In 1992 immigrants trying to join the United Electrical Workers mounted the first strike among production workers in Silicon Valley, and set up a planton and conducted a hunger strike to pressure their employer. A year later other Latino immigrants in San Francisco erected their tents on the sidewalk in front of Sprint's headquarters, after their workplace was closed days before they were scheduled to vote in a union election.

A decade ago anti-globalization activists and unions shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Young protestors chained their arms together inside metal pipes, and lay down in the intersections of downtown Seattle. Tens of thousands took over the streets. Other anti-globalization protests followed, in which activists battled for their right to use public space to challenge the international policies of the 1%.

Working-class support for the battle in Seattle had its roots in the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Workers could see the cost of free trade in the loss of their own jobs, as production moved south. Over the last two decades, many have also discovered that those same agreements and policies didn't make Mexicans better off, but led to their impoverishment as well.

NAFTA and free market policies forced on developing countries produced opportunities for banks and corporations to reap profits. They drove down wages, forced farmers off their land, and destroyed the unions and livelihood of millions of people. This system was designed on Wall Street, by the same bankers Occupiers hold responsible for the current crisis of foreclosures and unemployment in the U.S.

The current economic crisis doesn't stop at the border. In fact in Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, and elsewhere, it's been a fact of life for a long time. This is the source of forced migration -- what Garcia condemned at Occupy ICE.

The 99% live in all those countries where free trade agreements and structural adjustment policies are imposed. They also live in the communities of people who have come here as a result. Who, then, are more natural allies for Occupy protestors than people who've been on the receiving end of these policies for years?

In New York this connection wasn't lost on Occupy Wall Street. In October a group, Occupy Wall Street-Español was formed at the first Asemblea en Español. They, in turn, translated the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Participants formed a subgroup, Occupy Wall Street Latinoamericano, to spread the movement to Spanish-speaking communities, recognizing that the city is home to so many Mexicans from the state of Puebla that its nickname is PueblaYork, as well as much older established communities of Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and other Spanish-speaking people.

The group will soon publish the first issue of its own newspaper, with articles talking about immigration, globalization, and the specific attacks by the 1% on Latinos.

Claudia Villegas, a women's rights activist working with the group Occupy Wall Street Latinoamericano, helped organize a demonstration of immigrant women four days after police raided the Zuccotti Park encampment. "We decided to change our original plan for a march because we were afraid they would stop it," she says. "Nevertheless, 23 organizations participated including women's rights groups and, above all, those working with immigrant women."

In San Francisco a joint march of immigrant activists and Occupy participants helped to defend that city's encampment. In the general assembly meeting preceding it participants talked about the city's offer to move the Occupiers into an abandoned building in the Latino Mission District several miles away.

Few wanted to give up the camp on Justin Herman Plaza, and most felt the city was just trying to move them out of sight. But many people also felt that having an Occupy camp in the barrio was a good idea.

"We're still really working in parallel," Villegas says. She draws attention to the potential power of the immigrant rights movement, and what it could mean to OWS.

"We have to include the movement that began in 2006, when there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets across this country. People were reacting to the injustice of the system then too."

They're separate movements, though, she warns, and "our agenda has to come from immigrants themselves. We need to integrate, and at the same time the Occupy movement has to learn to accept us. But we're all on the same path."


Bringing the immigrant and Occupy movements together means more than setting up an encampment. The San Diego demonstration didn't set up an overnight camp, but it brought thousands of workers and supporters down to the ICE detention center to protest the firings of immigrant janitors.

The Occupy ICE protest was intended to draw public attention to the Federal government's immigration enforcement strategy that requires employers to fire undocumented workers. In Southern California, the multinational corporations that clean office buildings are terminating 2,000 union members.

Earlier waves of firings have targeted unionized building cleaners in Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco, sewing machine operators in Los Angeles, food service workers on university campuses, and thousands of others.

Garcia says ICE and the employers are in collusion. After firing union janitors with high seniority and benefits, using immigration status as a pretext, the companies can then hire new workers at lower wages with fewer benefits.

"To hide their greed the commercial real estate industry has used the tools of government to confuse and divide the 99%," he charges.

"They first said we were unskilled workers who should be happy to be working. They then weakened worker protections to make organizing virtually impossible. Over the last decade the industry has used immigration as a wedge to intimidate and, if need be, replace our workers. ICE is doing what the 1% corporate real estate industry wants: using immigration laws to recycle well paid janitors in the hopes of taking back gains in pay and benefits our union has won."

(Ironically, the week USWW organized Occupy ICE its parent union, SEIU, endorsed the reelection of President Obama, who is responsible for the ICE policy of firing workers.)

For Occupy, defending workers under attack is a way to survive, grow roots, and develop a strong base. That's not always the direction activists take, however. Near Oakland, over 200 immigrant workers at the largest foundry on the west coast, Pacific Steel Casting in Berkeley, are being fired in another "silent raid" like that hitting the janitors.

Through the summer and fall, foundry workers went to city councils, unions, churches, and community organizations, seeking help to pressure ICE not to force them from their jobs. Their campaign held "the migra" off for months, but the firings began nevertheless in November. Now these immigrant families are trying to survive. Occupy Oakland has yet to respond, however.

Instead, some of its activists are trying to shut down work in Oakland's port a second time, as well as others along the West Coast. An earlier march to close the port after the first eviction of Occupy Oakland drew thousands of people. The proposal for a second Coast-wide shutdown, however, is opposed by the longshore union.

The ILWU's opposition does not come from conservatism. The union, whose members make a living from international shipping and trade, has been one of the most vocal critics of U.S. free trade agreements. ILWU members have taken action many times to defend the SME and unions in Mexico, as well as other countries. Its locals, however, had no role in the decision to try to close the ports, nor did other port workers.

Solidarity is a two-way street, based on mutual respect. In most cities, including Oakland and San Francisco, labor has welcomed Occupy and sought to defend the encampments. In New York, Occupy activists have been given resources in many union halls, and unions have mobilized against police raids at Zuccotti Park.

An alliance of unions, immigrants, and Occupiers has great potential strength, not just in numbers, but also in the exchange of ideas and tactics. Unions in particular might benefit from wider use of the planton or Occupy encampment. Occupy ICE challenges the Occupy movement to take up the firings of immigrant workers, but it's also a challenge to unions themselves, many of which have watched in silence as longtime members have been forced from their jobs.

The vision of Occupy -- the 99% vs. the 1% -- has enormous support among immigrants and unions. In place of the tired rhetoric of politicians, shedding crocodile tears for the "middle class" while demonizing the poor, Occupy gives workers a vision of their commonality in the 99%.

This powerful message blows away illusions that higher-paid workers have more in common with stockbrokers than with immigrants laboring at minimum wage, or unemployed young people on the streets of African American ghettos or Latino barrios.

The Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad shares the same vision of class-based commonality.

"We are outraged," it says, "that U.S. citizens, when they demand justice and expose the inequalities that exist in their society, are treated like criminals. With the same outrage, we condemn the criminalization of migrant Mexicans by the U.S. government, the raids by immigration authorities [and] the militarization of the border... No human being should be treated as a criminal because they struggle to find better conditions in which to live."

[David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. His latest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. This article was published at Truthout and was crossposted to The Rag Blog. Read more of David Bacon's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Thorne Dreyer : Journalist, Author, and 'Investigative Poet' John Ross (1938-2011)

The late great John Ross.
Farewell to our great friend John Ross

See "Los Muertos," a poem by John Ross, Below.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011

Yesterday I received an email with the following message: “John Ross passed peacefully in the arms of his good friends Arminda and Kevin in Tzipijo, near Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacan, after a two-year lucha against liver cancer.” The message was sent from John's email address and included the above photo.

John Ross, who styled himself an "investigative poet," was a long-time contributor to and friend of The Rag Blog. He was a singular talent whose work was always enlightening and entertaining, every post a revelation. No one ever wrote about Mexico like John Ross did... or ever will again.

Ross, whose roots were in the old left politics of New York City and the beat poetry scene of San Francisco, visited Austin last March promoting his latest book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, and reading his poetry at MonkeyWrench and Resistencia bookstores.

Our mutual friend Mike Davis, himself a noted author and educator, wrote about John and El Monstruo: “From a window of the aging Hotel Isabel, where he has lived for almost a quarter of a century, John Ross sings a lusty corrido about a great, betrayed city and its extraordinary procession of rulers, lovers and magicians.”

Indeed, everything John Ross ever wrote was a "lusty corrido," a vivid grito of protest and celebration.

The Rag Blog last heard from John late last year when he informed us he would be suspending his writing indefinitely due to the rigors of the latest round of chemotherapy to treat his advancing cancer of the liver, which had been in remission but had returned with a vengeance.

In my copy of El Monstruo, John Ross wrote, “To Thorne: Desde el corazon del Monstruo sigues en la lucha!”

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering '60s underground journalist, is a director of the New Journalism Project, Inc., editor of The Rag Blog, and host of Rag Radio.]

• Please read Frank Barnacke's lovely tribute to John Ross. Also read John's unforgettable dispatches from the heart of El Monstruo on The Rag Blog, and read John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas.

John Ross dies:
Opposing every war was his obsession

The American rebel journalist, poet, novelist and human shield, John Ross (New York, 1938), deacon of Mexico correspondents, died yesterday at 8:58 a.m. in Santiago Tzipijo, Michoacan, after battling for two years against liver cancer.

A wake is being held on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. He will be cremated in Urapan and his ashes scattered in Mexico and in several cities in the U.S., according to his wishes.

Ross, whose last book is entitled El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, arrived at Casa Santiago, on the shores of the lake, on Dec. 31 in a taxi, reports Kevin Quigley, who with his wife is owner of the guest house. Both were compadres of the New Yorker.

Two days earlier, friends of the journalist had retrieved his archives from the room he occupied in the hotel Isabel in Mexico City, where he had lived since the week following the earthquake of 1985. His files are to be temporarily stored at the Cemanahuac Educational Community in Cuernavaca.

John Ross was a man of the Left and one of his great obsessions was the struggle against wars of every type. His great labor as an independent journalist and correspondent was to participate in and cover the political and social events that happened here, to make them known in the United States. “He never quit telling the gringos what was happening in Mexico” ...

-- La Jornada / Mexico City / January 18, 2011
(Translated by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog)

John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.


LOS MUERTOS

After they had waited on line

for nearly eight straight hours

to vote for the candidate of their choice,

The Dead were finally informed

that they were no longer inscribed

upon the precinct lists of the Republic.

But we have only come to exercise

our rights as responsible citizens

The Dead complained bitterly

for it seemed to them that the President

in the spirit of national unity

had called upon all the people

to cast their ballots

as is the democratic norm.

The official registrar

who was still quite alive

could only explain

the exclusion of the calacas

with platitudes about Morality.

Oh said The Dead and voted anyway.

But your votes are clearly illegal

winced the official Official,

they can't be counted in this election.

You have a point The Dead replied,

maybe they won't be counted now

but surely you will count them later.

© John Ross
When John Ross was 18, he was a young member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus. -- Beatitude Poetry

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Frank Bardacke : John Ross Had All the Right Enemies

John Ross, 1938-2011. Photo by Marcia Perskie, courtesy of Michael James, Heartland Cafe, Chicago.

All the right enemies:
Farewell to the utterly unique John Ross

By Frank Bardacke / CounterPunch / January 18, 2011

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was 16 years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of 20, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco 18 months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of PL (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist.

“Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabel in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died Monday morning, January 17, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

John Ross at Day of the Dead celebration. Photo from CounterPunch.
He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity, and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist -- that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him.

It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column.

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount New York Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission -- a “cancer resister,” he called himself -- and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.

[Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com. This article was written for and distributed by CounterPunch.]

Please see:

• "Journalist, author and poet John Ross (1938-2011)" by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011 (includes poem "Los Muertos" by John Ross)
• "John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas" / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2010
• More articles by John Ross on The Rag Blog
• "BOOKS / 'El Monstruo : Dread and Redemption in Mexico City'" by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2010

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John Ross : 'Los Barrenderos' are Mexico City's 'Working Class Heroes'

Barrendero. Photo by jmolagar / flickriver.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Working class heroes:
Mexico city's army of barrenderos

'We don't sweep the streets just for ourselves... Our ancestors, the Great Aztecs, come from this place and now it belongs to all of humanity.'

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / August 26, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- A small army of men and women in florescent orange and green uniforms pushing bright yellow carts hovers on the edge of the overflow crowd in the great Zocalo plaza of this city, ready to pounce. Whether it’s the 62 matches of the World Cup "FIFA Fan Fest" shown on giant screens for the diversion of the masses or a rally of tens of thousands of disgruntled citizens who have gathered to protest the policies of their government, the "barrenderos" are prepared to move in and haul away the mess the "fanaticos" have left behind.

"These Mexicanos are real 'cochinos' (pigs)," kvetched my young pal Alejandro Daniel, a member of the corps of "barrenderos" or street sweepers who are charged with the hopeless mission of keeping Mexico City's Centro Historico, the old quarter of this ancient capitol, free of debris, as he scooped up plastic cups, half-melted paletas (popsicles), the gnawed butts of tacos and "perros calientes" (hot dogs), several flattened plastic horns, and a sea of greasy waste paper, and artfully stuffed them into his cart.

Alejandro, 22, a second generation barrendero whose mom worked in the city's street cleaning department before him, is one of 8,500 street sweepers on the Cuauhtemoc borough's pay roll, 400 of them assigned to patrol the old quarter, a neighborhood which is roughly the configuration of Tenochtitlan, the island kingdom that was the crown jewel of the Aztec empire and is now listed on the UNESCO roster of world heritage sites.

The barrenderos work three shifts around the clock, but keeping the Centro Historico spic and span is an impossible job. By day, the neighborhood is a chaotic confluence of 2 million automobiles, trucks, buses, bicycles, and rickshaws and untold millions of pedestrians -- government workers, ambulantes (freelance venders), tourists, demonstrators, and residents -- who dump vast cordilleras of "basura" (garbage) onto the city streets.

Alejandro's "tramo" or route extends down Isabel la Catolica, a narrow street where this writer has lived for the past quarter of a century, eight blocks north to the national pawn shop ("Monte de Piedad" or "Mountain of Piety.") Along the way, the young barrendero sweeps up the gutters (the sidewalks are cleaned by residents and store owners), and dumps plastic public trash baskets lined up six to a block into his cart.

He also picks up garbage bags from private customers -- this take-out service ("la finca") is strictly prohibited by his bosses in the borough government but Alejandro's salary is only 1,300 pesos every 15 days ("La Quincena"), approximately $100 Americano, and he desperately needs his finca to make ends meet.

The barrenderos are also charged with following demonstrations through the Centro (there are an average 3.2 a day), sweeping up after the "cochino" marchers, painting out "pintas" or spray-painted slogans scrawled on the walls of the ancient neighborhood, and ripping down leaflets posted by militants. "We leave the ones against (President) Calderon," confides Alejandro, a partisan of former left mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The worst day of the year for the street sweeper is October 2nd, the annual anniversary of the 1968 student massacre (300 killed) in the Tlatelolco housing complex just north of the Centro Historico. For generations, students have marched to commemorate those who fell in the government-ordered slaughter, spray painting every surface in the neighborhood, battling riot police, and looting convenience stores. When the barrenderos try to wipe out the wall scrawls, they are attacked. "Once they sprayed me from top to bottom and then dumped my cart on top of me," rues Alejandro.

Mexico City, the largest urban stain in the Americas with 23 million sentient human beings packed into its metropolitan zone, generates a bit under 20,000 tons of garbage daily, about 1.45 kilos of basura per chilango (Mexico City resident). The capitol, which holds a fifth of the population, accounts for a third of the country's garbage.

"El barrendero hace cosquillas a la calle." ("The sweeper tickles the street.") Cartoon by Aitorelo.
Much of the effluvia is recycled by the workers themselves to augment their meager salaries and the leftovers buried in two pestilent landfills -- the "Bordo Poniente" out on the dried bed of Lake Texcoco behind the airport in the east of the city and now dramatically running out of room, is thought to be the largest garbage dump on the continent.

Recycling is mostly the domain of the collectors -- the barrenderos and the basureros or garbage men. At the dumps, "pepinadores," garbage pickers, sift through the waste for recyclables that the crews have missed.

From the crack of dawn through high noon, elephantine green trucks swamp the inner city, picking up the residue from shops and restaurants, private businesses and working class colonias, their arrivals still heralded by the ringing of a brass bell.

The garbage men (there are no women although half the street sweepers are female) toss overflowing waste barrels into grinders mounted on the back of the trucks, dump buckets of industrial grease and organic slop, often spewing debris into the gutters for the sweepers to clean up.

Although the barrenderos and the basureros are fierce competitors for the city's garbage, they have had to forge strategic alliances to get the job done. "We consider the garbage crews to be our companeros," Alejandro affirms.

I follow Alejandro and his flailing broom through traffic as he darts down Isabel La Catolica, often squeezing between parked cars to retrieve a banana peel or a discarded newspaper. The barrendero wrestles the contents of the street trash baskets into his cart but hesitates outside the dozens of fast food franchises here in the Centro so that the hungry and the homeless can fish for discarded food first.

These days, he is often challenged by can collectors -- with unemployment at a record high and old people scraping by on meager pensions, recycled cans bring in a few coins for the underclass. Alejandro is also wary of "pirates" who steal unguarded carts and brooms and swipe the barrenderos' fincas.

The street sweepers' brooms are emblematic of their "oficio" (profession) but lately they have become the source of labor tensions. Their bosses, bureaucrats in a city government that has been administrated by the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for the past 13 years, insist upon buying commercial brooms rather than the picturesque bundled tree branches with which the barrenderos have historically swept the city's streets. If the street sweepers want an old-fashioned broom, they have to buy or fashion it themselves.

Alejandro's gaze is fixed on the gutter. Sometimes he finds coins or lost cell phones, but mostly these days the streets are littered with cigarette butts. Ever since this left-run city barred smoking in office buildings, restaurants, and bars, the streets have been converted into public ashtrays.

Between Uruguay and Carranza streets, the street sweeper bends to retrieve a plastic bag that has escaped from a nearby Sanborn's department store and wrapped itself around a scraggly tree planted in a tiny square of dirt, one of the few green spaces in the congested heart of the Monster. Although a city ordinance now obligates dog owners to pick up after their curs, street dogs are attracted to these dirt patches and Alejandro has to step smartly to avoid the dogshit.

Just then a driver pulls up to curbside and throws open the car door without looking, a classic "portazo" that knocks the barrandero flat. I offer him a hand.

"Even though we wear these bright orange uniforms so we don't get run down in traffic, people never see us," he complains, "we are brooms to them -- not people. Its like we are invisible."

"Los Invisibles" is, in fact, the name of a troupe of barrenderos who do street performances around the Centro Historico.

"We see that we are underappreciated. Sometimes people are personally offensive to us. They call us 'mugreros' (dirty ones) and much worse so we are trying to educate the public to respect us more," explains Pia V., a founder of The Invisibles. "Our shows also give us an opportunity to make the neighbors more aware of their environment and encourage them to do recycling and help us keep the streets clean."

Pia and Alejandro invite me to a rehearsal of Los Invisibles on Regina Street, a block devastated by the great 8.1 1985 earthquake here that the city has transformed into a pedestrian cultural passageway. A stage has been cobbled together by the community.

Poster for El Barrendero, starring Cantinflas.
Moni, the diminutive mother of two girls (the kids have come out to see her perform) opens the show with a bouncy number, "Caminando Por El Centro":

Walking through the Centro/I encountered a broom/that didn't have an owner/so I started to sweep up Allende Street.

"When I start to sweep/I think about my family/of which I am the strong arm/that maintains them..."

The two girls jump up on the stage and embrace their mom.

Dani follows with a rant about "El Pinche Viejo" ("The Fucking Old Man"), a supervisor who is taking his time about assigning her a street to clean. She frets that she will miss her finca:

Tell me pinche viejo/how long do I have to wait/for you to make up your mind?

The barrenderos raise their brooms in a martial salute. Alejandro launches into a rap about "Derechos de Senoridad" ("Seniority Rights"):

There are people with too much money/while others don't have enough to eat/the rich are the ones who make all the frauds/our job is to sweep up this black history...

Pia takes on the tourists who flock to the Centro and do not use the public trash baskets:

I ask you please/Not to dirty the streets/In whatever city you come from/And that someday you will remember us/Sweeping up our country.

Neighbors gather in front of the "vecindades," the spruced up old slum buildings that line Regina Street and laugh and applaud. The barrenderos are popular figures in the inner city barrios of Mexico's meotroplises, often seen pushing their carts and cans in the company of a string of mangy garbage dogs who live in the "depositos" or collection centers.

Street sweepers are intensely focused on the neighborhoods they clean and often the source of fresh "chisme" (gossip), the secret fuel that powers Mexican society. Back in the 1960s, barrenderos were often the source of popular troubadour Chava Flores' urban ballads and the immortal Cantinflas's final Mexican movie El Barrendero (1982) is about a heroic street sweeper who rescues a stolen painting he finds in the garbage from a gang of thieves.

But too often the city's barrenderos are seen as little more than street furniture, part of the mob of shoeshine men, newspaper venders, organ grinders, buskers, beggars, "toreros" (freelance ambulantes), and "rateros" (street thugs) who fill up the streets of the Centro. Working class heroes are hard to find and the barrenderos certainly qualify.

The street sweeper brigades were an early feature of the city's left governments. They came into their own after the two-year long renovation of the Centro Historico under Mayor Lopez Obrador that was financed by the world's richest tycoon, Carlos Slim, who indeed grew up on these mean streets and is now the virtual owner of the old neighborhood with a reported portfolio of 160 buildings.

"We don't sweep the streets just for ourselves," Alejandro explains, "our ancestors, the Great Aztecs, come from this place and now it belongs to all of humanity."

"When I was a kid I would go to the Alameda Park and the Zocalo with my family and I would wonder who sweeps up these places?" Pia remembers. "Now it is me. It is my responsibility. Although the people are rude to us and pretend not to see us, our city couldn't breathe without our brooms. Everyone would be buried under the basura."

[John Ross, the author of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, will be walking the garbage-strewn streets of San Francisco for the next weeks.]

The Rag Blog

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