El Día de Los Muertos

And Halloween

Quo Vadis?

By

Rodolfo F. Acuña

Mexicans, more than most races, seem preoccupied with death.  Since colonial times Mexican laborers have continuously been uprooted, traveling thousands of miles from the interior of Mexico forging an El Camino Real to to mining camps and plantations in northern Mexico. They arrived in places like Zacatecas where they fanned out, forging spider web corridors in form of roads.

These workers felt vulnerable. They missed home, and most knew that they would never see their homes or families again.

La Canción Mixteca written in 1912 in Mexico City by José López Alavez, a Oaxacan composer, speaks to feelings of homesickness for Oaxaca. The song was later taken north to places such as Chicago where it became a favorite of Mexican migrants in the United States.

How far I am from the land where I was born!

And seeing myself so lonely and sad like a leaf in the wind,

I want to cry, I want to die from this feeling.

Oh Land of the Sun! I yearn to see you!

 

¡Qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido!

y al verme tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento,

quisiera llorar, quisiera morir de sentimiento.

¡Oh Tierra del Sol! Suspiro por verte

y al verme tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento,

quisiera llorar, quisiera morir de sentimiento

 

In studying the history of Arizona miners I found it was common among these laborers to form mutualistas (Mutual Aid societies). Mineros wanted to care for their families in case they died before seeing the land of the sun. It was an insurance collective that would bury the member on a plot of land, and mark the grave with a cross.

Traveling around the Southwest today, you see crosses on the side of roads with flowers and photos of young children and adults who were killed by a motorist. Often their families don’t have the funds to bury them. The practice of building makeshift altars is also spreading to urban spaces where it is being adopted by other ethnic and racial groups.

I often think of death not because I believe in an afterlife but because I want to remember and to be remembered much like I remember my parents and my grandparents.  My own personal belief about death is expressed in George Carlin’s routine on death. Carlin says when you are dead, you are dead, you are not departed, you are not resting, you are dead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PiZSFIVFiU. There is no heaven, there is no hell, you have not lost your love ones, and they are dead.

As a kid these religious days meant that we got a religious holiday. At least for me, the days had very little meaning. Halloween fell on the 31^st of October, a day that we went trick or treating, accumulating mounds of candy that surely contributed to our tooth decays and diabetes.

Every year Halloween seems to have less and less meaning for most Americans; its only function is to feed their superstitions and multiply candy and costume sales. 

On this day, death is portrayed by witches, black cats, and omens, with young and old alike going to haunted houses. Americans enjoy being scared. It epitomizes a fear of death – a sort of Friday the 13^th. http://www.halloweenhistory.org/  http://www.livescience.com/40596-history-of-halloween.html

The closest thing to a Mexican version of Halloween is the horror story about El Cucuy that is told children to keep them in line.  It is the Mexican version of the boogeyman that is in search of victims. Significantly, the Cucuy is a Spanish invention, originating in Portugal and Galicia and transported to the Americas.

El Día de los Muertos is more profound. In places like Los Angeles, San Antonio and Chicago, it is a day of remembrance. As the Mexican population increases, it is spreading and infiltrating the popular culture.  Unlike Halloween, it has little to do with “me.”

During El Día de los Muertos we design altars and adorn them with pictures of loved ones, their favorite foods, and other items. Their favorite music is played.

The Day resembles Sunday at a cemetery where entire Mexican families show up and visit their dead, clean the gravestones of their parents and loved ones, and visit them. They may be dead but they are remembered.

I don’t want to go into a historical narrative about El Día de los Muertos, only that it is millenniums old. With Mexicans, it is rooted in their indigenous past, and it was later appropriated by Spanish Catholicism.

The celebration goes beyond trick or treating, scaring the hell out of someone or the cruel incidents of killing a black cat. As Carlin said, when you are dead, you are dead.

Today I write books and articles because I want to be remembered. I don’t want to die without leaving my footprints, giving testimony to my existence and reminding people that I was here.

As I have stated, I am not religious but that does not mean that I do not remember. When I went to Nogales, I visited my maternal grandparents’ grave. I was overcome by nostalgia. I remembered getting shoved out of the first grade in public school and being put into a mentally retarded class.

My parents pulled me out of public school and sent me to live with my grandparents who would walk me to a Catholic School three miles from the house. My mother was legally blind and sick – but I could not understand why I was sent away from home through no fault of my own – I felt that I was bad because I could not speak English.

Touring the various altars I will remember colleagues such as Roberto Sifuentes, Shirlene Soto, and Lorenzo Flores as well as students such as Teri Orozco, Martin Cano and Mario Muñiz who are alive because we remember them.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCQnUuq-TEE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead

Will El Día de los Muertos become another Halloween or another Cinco de Mayo where people celebrate it without really remembering? The American capitalist culture is rapidly coopting lo mexicano. Will it suffer the fate of the Cinco de Mayo that has become one big happy hour with local strip joints selling Cinco de Mayo margaritas?

El Día los Muertos belongs to us and our memories, let’s see how long it takes for it to be franchised by Disney.

Professor Rodolfo Acuña is a longtime defender of Mexican and Chicano culture.

For those who have an extra $5 a month for scholarship, the For Chicana/o Studies Foundation was started with money awarded to Rudy Acuña as a result of his successful lawsuit against the University of California at Santa Barbara. The Foundation has given over $60,000 to plaintiffs filing discrimination suits against other universities. However, in the last half dozen years it has shifted its focus, and it has awarded 7-10 scholarships for $750 per award on an annual basis to Chicana/o and Latina/o students at California State University-Northridge (CSUN). The For Chicana/o Studies Foundation is a 501(c) (3) Foundation and all donations are deductible. Although many of its board members are associated with Chicana/o Studies, it is not part of the department. All monies generated go to fund these scholarships.

We know that times are hard. Lump sum donations can be sent to For Chicana Chicano Studies Foundation, 11222 Canby Ave., Northridge, Ca. 91326 or through PayPal below. You can reach us at forchs@earthlink.net. Click on to http://forchicanachicanostudies.wikispaces.com/ and make a donation. You may also elect to send $5.00, $10.00 or $25.00 monthly. For your convenience and privacy you may donate via PayPal. The important thing is not the donation, but your continued involvement. 

 

Many people have sung the praises of the progressive government that came to power in Bolivia in 2006. Under the leadership of Evo Morales, unionist and former coca grower who led the relatively new MAS party to a sweeping victory, the Bolivian government has instituted a far reaching expansion of welfare and social services, while putting an end to decades of rightwing and military rule.

But the Left has a long history of proclaiming premature victories and shielding regimes that pay lip service to their values. And while Bolivia certainly is not hiding any gulag archipelago, there is a troubling underside to this “plurinational state” that needs to be examined before we can proclaim any revolutionary victory. With an eye to Egypt, many progressives have recently warned of the danger of seeing a popular revolution where something far more sinister is going on. The Left should also revisit its long held optimism about Morales.

First of all, Bolivia’s new social programs need to be demystified. The MAS government has taken the bold yet hardly unprecedented step of withholding a small share of the hydrocarbon profits from its booming gas industry. This is indeed a step against unmitigated corporate rapaciousness, but it is not a step towards revolution. For one thing, social struggles in Bolivia had already made unmitigated corporate rapaciousness untenable before 2006. In opposition to the government of the time, they defeated major neoliberal privatization projects, first at Cochabamba and then on a nationwide scale. The MAS government has only put into policy a reality that was created by hundreds of thousands of people in direct struggle. And this policy is not even as radical as, say, the New Deal. Minus Morales’ grandiose rhetoric, it’s not even as progressive as what Norway does with its gas profits, and there’s nothing revolutionary about Norway. It’s just another capitalist country that keeps people in line with high salaries or welfare checks instead of police truncheons. The sorry lot of immigrants in that Scandinavian paradise shows that the Norwegians have not created a new society.

And neither has Bolivia. As elsewhere, the social programs are used to restructure society in the interests of control. Take the money that the MAS government gives to mothers, for example. As far as public assistance goes, it’s a great form of protection, but only mothers who see Western-style doctors throughout their pregnancy and give birth in a hospital are eligible. In a country where home births, midwives, and holistic, non-commercial medicine are still viable traditions, this policy constitutes a major assault on indigenous cultures, as the indigenous feminist group Las Imillas points out.

But most feminists and other would-be dissidents have been kept quiet by the most effective strategy the Morales government has deployed: integrating the social movements into the State itself. Key leaders from all the important grassroots groups have been given positions in government ministries or elected straight onto the MAS ticket. What might have been the object of their criticism has become their employer.

And it’s not like the Bolivian government has avoided committing any outrages that feminists might criticize. At the end of last year, two MAS deputies assaulted two indigenous cleaning women, raping one of them, at a party in a provincial legislative assembly building and in sight of numerous other deputies. The one assault was scarcely mentioned in the media, but the rape was caught on video. While the government charged the two deputies with improper use of public office, they resisted charging them with rape for half a year, and their first move was to imprison the technician who leaked the surveillance video. The cleaning woman lost her job, while the provincial governor, also a MAS member, suggested the whole scandal had been organized by the rightwing opposition, a claim some pro-government feminists allegedly echoed.

[pullquote]The key reason why Bolivia’s MAS government cannot be considered revolutionary is because all its social programs are predicated on business-as-usual capitalist growth, whether this is the extraction of natural gas or the paving of the rainforest.[/pullquote]

The MAS strategy to silence social movements by incorporating them into the government is not new. Journalist Rafael Uzcátegui documents, in his book Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, how the Chavez regime that served as a major inspiration for Morales systematically institutionalized social movements and used them to protect the government from opposition, also hoodwinking international progressive celebrities like Michael Albert to become advocates for the regime. The political movements in Bolivia and Venezuela are closer to Peronism, itself a sort of gentle fascism, than to any revolutionary socialism. The link with Peronism was explicit in Kirchner’s Argentina, but in closely allied Bolivia and Venezuela it is just as evident.

The key reason why Bolivia’s MAS government cannot be considered revolutionary is because all its social programs are predicated on business-as-usual capitalist growth, whether this is the extraction of natural gas or the paving of the rainforest. They have quietly changed their much celebrated “Mother Earth” Law to allow the importation of genetically modified foods, and they have endangered the fragile altiplano ecosystem to boost their mass production of quinoa for international export.

A particularly egregious case that shows the many sinister dynamics of the Morales government at work is that of the Bioceanic Highway. The highway is one of many development projects being pushed by IIRSA, the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, which is supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and in turn links up with NAFTA and Plan Pueblo Panama. The purpose of the highway is to link Atlantic and Pacific markets, extending from Brazil, through Bolivia, to Chile and Peru. In practical terms, the highway means an explosion in the commercialization of the South American interior and the death of the Amazon rainforest.

In Bolivia, the MAS government has plotted the highway’s route right through TIPNIS, a rainforest preserve that is also the protected home of several indigenous nations. Although MAS changed Bolivia’s constitution to make it the “plurinational state” that recognizes indigenous rights, these rights have proven to be nothing but scraps of paper. They do not guarantee indigenous access to the land or recognize the land as something other than a commodity, both prerequisites for the survival of indigenous lifeways.

Morales is an outspoken priest for the religion of progress, Western style, and in the face of local resistance he launched a major campaign to convince indigenous inhabitants of TIPNIS that the highway would be good for them. Without the highway, the government would not build any hospitals in the impoverished interior (encouraging traditional forms of healthcare was off the agenda). Despite the media blitz—after all the highway is supported by the Right and the Left—locals rejected the project in a major referendum. This was no setback for the democratic government of Morales, however. They announced they would simply prepare for a new referendum, much the same way the European Union just ignored the results when popular referenda in several member states vetoed the EU constitution. Referendum or no, construction on the highway is already in advanced stages in Bolivia, and huge swaths of rainforest have been paved over.

With a rhetoric that is surprisingly neoliberal, Morales defends the highway on the grounds that it will create more jobs. He is protected from accusations of being just another capitalist thanks to decades of work by populists in the South American Left, who have confused anti-capitalism with anti-imperialism and substituted anti-Americanism for anti-imperialism. This substitution seemed like a convenient and accurate generalization, as US capital was the biggest force in South America for a long time, but in reality it was nothing other than a disguised nationalism. Never mind that a country is more than its investors, nor that US capital has been largely overshadowed by European and Asian capital when it comes to South American development. Local capital has also become a force to be reckoned with. Case in point, the highway construction in Bolivia is being carried out by Bolivian companies and funded by Brazilian capital. For most of the supposedly anticapitalist Left in South America, this has been cause not for condemnation but for patriotic celebration.

And the celebration is a morbid one indeed. Aside from cutting the forest in half and exposing it to heavy pollution, the highway will also open it up to logging, poaching, and coca cultivation. Which is why Morales’ principal base, the Coca Growers’ Union that launched him into power, is an avid supporter of the highway. Specifically because it will allow them to cut down the rainforest and grow more coca on stolen indigenous land.

When thousands of indigenous people and their supporters protested the highway and began a multi-month march from the interior to La Paz, Morales accused them of being supported by the US government(in the process tacitly acknowledging that protest organizers’ phones had been tapped). This has been a consistent formula since 2006. Anyone protesting the government is accused to be in cahoots with the rightwing and the CIA. But the CIA is no longer necessary to protect business in South America. The new “revolutionaries” are more than capable.

In September 2011, police violently attacked the eighth indigenous march in defense of TIPNIS, injuring numerous participants, including several children. But the police are far from the most effective arms the MAS government employs for social control. Its preferred method of repression is to turn social movements against one another. MAS members and activists in the town of San Ignacio de Moxos organized a strike and blockade to try and stop the indigenous march. They also attacked a radio station that transmitted a call in support of the march.When the march finally reached La Paz, MAS mobilized the miners to oppose them. Now lured by promises that the highway would bring jobs, the same miners who had valiantly stood down the military in street fighting in 2005 now threw sticks of dynamite at indigenous marchers in front of the San Francisco church. They had already covered the walls of the city in pro-highway graffiti as the police looked on.

When some anonymous opponents of the highway began carrying out sabotage and arson actions in La Paz, the government arrested thirteen anarchists practically at random. Far to miss out on the greatest of Bush-era bandwagons, it charged them under Bolivia’s brand new anti-terrorism law. Nevermind that the social movements that defeated the rightwing regime frequently used molotovs, slingshots, heavy fireworks, and dynamite against security forces, setting fire to a bank was now to be considered terrorism, and setting off a smoke bomb in the lobby of the Vice Ministry of the Environment would be prosecuted as attempted murder against the Vice Minister.

There was no physical evidence connecting any of the arrested to the sabotage actions being prosecuted. The only reason for their arrest was that they represented a cross-section of the anarchist movement in La Paz. The prosecutor even told the mother of one of arrested that they knew he was innocent, but hoped he would give the police more information if he were locked up for long enough.

Most of the arrested were released. Of the three whom prosecutors continue to target, one was released into house arrest after collaborating with authorities, another was given house arrest in May of this year, just shy of one year in prison, and the third was released into house arrest about two months later.

As recently as July 22 of this year, the MAS government justified its practice of infiltrating the indigenous opposition to the highway. The struggle continues, but the social movements stay mum, or they actively support the highway.

The cynicism of Bolivian society only deepens as solidarity disappears, replaced by an ethos of progress and personal gain. But these newly cynical activists hold on to their practice of direct action, as when the people of San Ignacio held a strike and blockade to stop the indigenous march. While clashes like this began as a calculated government strategy to disable any opposition, they have begun to spiral out of control. In the city of Cochabamba, where groups of neighbors organized water committees to build their own water infrastructure, and then the whole city mobilized to heroically defeat the selling of the water to Bechtel, neighborhoods have begun fighting one another for control of the water.

Add to that the rampant patriotism, jingoism against Chile going back to a 19^th century border war, the growing militarism, the machine gun or shotgun toting cops in front of every single bank, and you can’t help but suspect that Bolivia is more of an authoritarian dystopia than a society in the throes of a revolution. One old indigenous radical confided to me that the macho, homophobic Morales has inaugurated dozens of new football stadiums during his tenure, but has not set foot in a single theater. He also said that the president plays up his indigenous identity but opposes any meaningful autonomy for indigenous peoples.

Bolivia is a colonial creation. The patriotism that the MAS government has excelled at promoting is a commitment to continuing that colonial project. Up to 2005, women, miners, peasants, and indigenous people had effectively blocked capitalist development across the country. The supposedly revolutionary government has succeeded in renewing Western-style development on a larger scale, not just in spite of the social movements but generally with their active collaboration.

If this is the kind of example that gives people hope for the creation of a new world, we live in sorry times indeed. If this is revolution, the status quo might be preferable.

Fortunately, MAS is not the only model for liberation we can look to in South America.

To be continued next week… 

John Severino has travelled extensively in South America and organizes solidarity for social movements there. His writings can be found onchileboliviawalmapu.wordpress.com