On Sunday, April 10th, in East Los Angeles, there will be a mass demonstration to honor the memory, life, and work of Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. In the spirit of land, justice, and liberty. the Marcha por Zapata has taken place each year in East Los since 1994. The march has as its demands, “Stop the recruitment of raza youth to fight in Iraq, documents and licenses for all, support indigenous rights and culture, defend the struggling workers, farmers, and indigenous all over the continent, and no to white supremacy.” Xispas encourages everyone in Southern Cali to join this protest. People should gather at 9 am at the corner of Lorena Street and Cesar Chavez Ave. in East LA. The protestors will then march to Parque de Mexico (corner of Main Street, Valley Blvd & Mission Road - adjacent to Lincoln Park). A rally featuring socially conscious music and speakers will take place at the park starting at 11 am. ¡Viva Zapata!

While renovating Casa Azul (Blue House), the home-turned museum of Frida Kahlo located in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City, administrators of the museum were surprised to make a remarkable find. When work began on restoring the private areas of the home/museum… a huge wardrobe of 180 articles of clothing were uncovered. Many of the costumes found were depicted in Kahlo’s famous self-portraits, and the collection includes shawls, shoes, and the indigenous jewelry she was so well known for wearing. Also found were the pair of earrings given to Kahlo as a gift from Pablo Picasso. Kahlo famously showed off Picasso’s offering in a self-portrait that featured the ornaments shaped like tiny hands.

Many of Kahlo’s trademark dresses are from the state of Oaxaca, where seamstresses in Tehuantepec patterned clothes following ancient Zapotec Indian traditions… a craft carried on in the present. Of course, Kahlo and her famous husband Diego Rivera, like many Mexican artists of the day, were extremely interested in and inspired by the Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec civilizations that once ruled the country. These progressive minded artists sought to break the ties to European culture and establish an authentic Mexican culture based on indigenous foundations. While today people may regard Kahlo’s hand-embroidered Indian dresses and pre-Columbian jewelry as fashionable… it is noteworthy to remember that when she wore her Tehuana dresses she was defying the bourgeois conventions of Mexico’s elites, who preferred European aesthetics over anything Mexican.

Despite the mainstreaming and commercialization of Frida Kahlo, she remains an important figure for many reasons. Her artistic creations came to be world renown, attracting the attention of artists around the world, including the founder of surrealism, André Breton. Kahlo was a fierce nationalist and a communist, and her militant politics led her to champion the poor throughout her life. Her last public act was to take part in a demonstration in opposition to the US backed coup in Guatemala, despite the fact that she was suffering from pneumonia. She died eleven days later in 1954 at the age of 47. Perhaps above all else, she is remembered for her inner strength and resolve, which has served as an inspiration to women all over the world. As her famous husband put it so eloquently, “She is the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honesty… one might even say with impassive cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women.”

Casa Azul is the house where Frida Kahlo was born and died. Diego Rivera arranged to have all of Kahlo’s possessions recovered in her home to remain on display there, making the recently discovered artifacts a part of the museum’s permanent collection. Today Casa Azul is one of Mexico’s most-visited museums, and its officials are looking to a special exhibit of the newly discovered clothes to take place a year from now. When that exhibit takes place, you can be sure that Xispas will be writing about it. (posted by Mark Vallen)

[ Xispas will be running the Column of the Americas by our friends Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales. The writers can be reached at XColumn@aol.com ]

“Like most campesinos, Cesar Chavez was the color of the earth. There’s little doubt that history will one day look back on the United Farm Worker movement as an indigenous insurrection - a struggle for dignity and human rights for a people who have been here forever. It should also be seen as a green movement as the UFW has always warned consumers about their own exposure to toxic chemicals. When one hears the name of Cesar Chavez, it is usually associated with Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahandas Gandhi. The late Mexican American labor leader came into national prominence for his several historic fasts (1960s-1990s) that brought to light the plight of farm workers. Yet as we celebrate his birthday (March 31), we should always remember that he co-founded the United Farm Worker’s of America with his wife, Helen Chavez, and Dolores Huerta and that their very first strike was in support of Filipino farm workers.

Perhaps one day, his name will also be associated with the likes of Zapata, Geronimo and Sitting Bull. On the day before Chavez died in Arizona in 1993, he was reading a book on Native Americans. At this, he told a colleague: “We need to work with our Native American brothers and sisters.” It’s no secret that most campesinos are indigenous or Indian and many nowadays come directly from their pueblos in Mexico and Central America, speaking Zapotec, Otomie, Nahuatl or a variety of Maya languages. But even those who do not speak their ancestral tongue are indigenous; they have always had a special relationship to the land. Their hands tell us this. As Huerta has often said, farm workers do not hate their work… they’re not all trying to escape the fields. They love the land. What they don’t like is the low pay and the extreme exploitation. To this day, farm workers remain outside of the protection of the National Labor Relations Board. And they are treated as foreigners. In dictionaries, the word dehumanization should come illustrated with pictures of hunched-over farm workers. Chavez used to say that the UFW was born the day the Bracero program was abolished in 1964. The Bracero program, was in effect, modern slave labor. Workers had no rights, except the right to be exploited and shipped back home. In fact, many (of those still alive) are owed money withheld from their paychecks from the 1940s-1960s.

A generation later, and now, incredulously, there’s a push for another bracero program, albeit with a different name. So desperate is the situation regarding the border that this new “guest worker” program is being touted as a solution. If Chavez were alive, he would say this legalized indentured labor is the problem, not the solution. The move to legally codify a category of humans with less rights and less pay is contrary to the march of history. It’s a return to 19th century coolie labor; contract them cheaply (leave their families behind), subject them to inhumane working conditions, then ship them home. If they escape, sic the Migra on them. And if they have not given the patron any trouble (union organizing), they can return. This is seen as an alternative to dying in the desert and continuing to work in the shadows. Unless contested, this may become the future model labor for the United States. Perhaps a better alternative and interim solution can be found in Europe. There, workers from any of the 25 nations that make up the European Community are legally entitled to work in each other’s nations. In North America - as a result of NAFTA — jingoistic politicians treat human beings not as workers, but as criminals. Under this tri-national agreement, goods and capital generally flow freely, but not human beings.

To conveniently assuage America’s fears, hard-working migrants are now conflated with terrorists, thus the push to further militarize the border. Some will not be happy until there’s an impregnable 2000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, patrolled by trigger-happy vigilantes. The merchants of fear have done a great disservice to humanity by getting people to see the issue of migration within the context of criminality or “the war on terrorism,” rather than as part of a global economic phenomenon - one that could easily be resolved. If Chavez taught us anything, it was to appreciate the men and women who provide us our daily sustenance. This begins by accepting and treating all workers as full human beings.” © Column of the Americas 2005

On April 2nd, over 3,000 people staged a 3 mile march through downtown Salinas in Central California’s fertile Salinas Valley to protest government budget cuts that will permanently close the city’s three public libraries. Demonstrators chanted: ¡Libros Si! ¡Bombas No! (Book yes! Bombs no!) ¡Si, Se Puede! (Yes we can!), and ¡Viva Chavez! as they snaked their way through poor neighborhoods to the Cesar Chavez Public Library. The libraries are the city’s community centers, where farm worker’s children can study, use computers, and wait after school until their parents come home from the fields. One marcher said, ‘When you close libraries, you are closing off opportunities. It is particularly wrong when you are closing them in a poor community. Where are the kids going to go to use a computer?’ Over 3,000 UFW Aztec eagle flags had been passed out to the demonstrators, so the march was a sea of red. All three of the public libraries in Salinas, the hometown of Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, will be closed on June 30th due to “lack of funds.” Salinas, known as “the Salad Bowl of the World”, is a city built on agribusiness where more than half of the population are native Spanish speakers.

The march not only included organized labor from the United Farm Workers (UFW), but also hundreds of poets, regional and local authors, artists, peace activists and library supporters. The marchers rallied in front of the Cesar Chavez library - one of the three branches scheduled for closure. The other two branches are named after Steinbeck, who took imagery from the Salinas landscape and it’s depression-era population when writing The Grapes of Wrath. The rally site included live bands on a stage sponsored by Radio Campesina, the UFW-owned station. The marchers joined with hundreds who had camped out overnight at the library to stage a 24-hour fundraising read-a-thon against the closings. The read-a-thon began with County Supervisor Fernando Armenta reading from Cesar Chavez’s Farm Workers Prayer, “Show me the suffering of the most miserable, so I will know my people’s plight. Free me to pray for others, for you are present in every person.” The readers were also joined by Salinas City Councilman Sergio Sanchez, who spent the night in a tent on the grounds and who noted that the read-a-thon never stopped throughout the night.

The shutdown would make Salinas the largest American city without a public library. UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta addressed the crowd, saying “This is not a poor community, this is a rich area. But the wealth… we know, is not in the hands of the workers, it’s in the hands of the growers. We want to get back some of the money we made for them to keep this library open!” Actor Hector Elizondo, best known for starring in TV’s medical drama Chicago Hope, told those assembled that libraries had been key to his own development, he called a library a sanctuary, “A place where you could be creatively subversive… and it changed my life because through books I started to question.” Elizondo also said that closing a library was like “putting a tourniquet around your mind.” The read-a-thon also attracted writers Anne Lamott and Maxine Hong Kingston. Poet and artist, Jose Montoya, one of the original members of the Culture Clash theater troupe, told the crowd that “It’s hard to comprehend why, of all things, you would want to close libraries… that’s so counterproductive.” Fernando Suarez, the father of a young US Army soldier killed in Iraq also spoke from the podium, and speakers repeatedly made the point that while hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent for war in Iraq… money cannot be found to keep libraries open at home. The libraries will close unless $500,000 is raised by June 30th, and even that amount of money will only keep the libraries open one day a week through 2005. At the march and rally thousands signed petitions asking Governor Schwarzenegger to keep the libraries open, and a much larger march is being planned for April 12th in the state’s capital of Sacramento where demands will be made for full funding of the libraries.

Lincoln Cushing, author of Revolution: Cuban Poster Art, came with a San Francisco Bay area delegation of the national Progressive Librarians Guild. Cushing told the crowd, “The Progressive Librarians Guild wishes to let the people of Salinas know that we see this issue as being at the forefront of public access in this country, and the labor community has a long history of resisting abuse, and one of the slogans is ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ Salinas may be taking the hit now, but we are all vulnerable!” Cushing’s remarks are in part verified by the American Library Association, who have been warning that hundreds of libraries across the country are reducing hours, eliminating staff, thinning inventories, and closing their doors due to lack of funding. The staff at Xispas understands this crisis in a historical context. The former dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, once said “I don’t want an educated population, I want oxen.” It seems that Somoza’s ghost now haunts our land, and a tourniquet is indeed being placed around the minds of working people. Compañeras y compañeros -it is time to resist. For more information, visit the Save Salinas Libraries website.