To return to AGR, click here

To read an article, click on the headline.

A sweeping statement

A war beyond borders

Empowering women is the way forward in saving
Africa from AIDS devastation

back to top

A sweeping statement

By Dan Glaister

May 14 — Every other Wednesday, I find a man called Miguel -- accompanied by his father, also called Miguel, and occasionally his son, another Miguel -- in my garden. Miguel, well, all three Miguels, are my gardeners. They came with the house, itemized somewhere in the small print on the rental agreement. Armed with petrol-driven machines to defeat every possible challenge that a modest Californian garden could offer, the three Miguels perform what the estate agent charmingly termed “cut and blow” (this was just after he’d told me that the dilapidated park down the street was an “ethnic park”). Cut and blow involves cutting the grass with a petrol-driven lawnmower, and blowing away any dead leaves with a petrol-driven leaf blower.

Miguel and Miguel are from Mexico. Miguelito was born in California. Up and down my street, across the neighborhood, and throughout much of Los Angeles and the rest of the US, small gangs of Mexicans are busily cutting, blowing and even shearing and planting, for all I know.

Once a week, my cleaner comes. She’s from El Salvador. She does the equivalent of a spring clean every week, washes my clothes and would probably cook my lunch if I asked her to. She moved here 18 months ago and is working to pay for water mains to be connected to her home in San Salvador.

When I take my children out to the local park there are two groups of mothers, huddled in opposite corners of the tiny playground: the Anglos and the nannies. The nannies are not Anglos. The nannies are exclusively Hispanic, most of them Mexicans. Some of them probably came from Meet A Maid, a nanny recruitment center where Anglos can go to assess the help, and even pick one out of a line if they wish. It sounds like a brothel.

And on it goes: the mechanic fixing my car, the team of people working at the car wash, the laborers building the increasingly extravagant houses in my neighborhood, the man who came to install the TV, the people serving coffee, washing up dishes, cooking the food in restaurants. It’s a familiar pattern to anyone who has lived here for a while, but to the newly arrived, the economic and political realities of living in a state with a large, willing, and economically-deprived workforce in a neighboring state just a few hours drive away is shocking. Perhaps it is some hangover of British post-colonial guilt, but living and employing and being locked in mutual dependence with an underclass feels morally wrong, especially when that relationship seems to perpetuate the economic discrimination and ethnic segregation that is so visible in LA.

But you know what they say, especially when you’ve just turned up: don’t rock the boat, look and learn and see how things work before leaping to judge, or even to question. These things are so deeply ingrained in the structures of the society that they’ll never go away.

But what if they did? What would happen here in this desert paradise if all the help stopped helping? If the Mexicans, the Salvadoreans, the Guatemalans, the Hondurans simply disappeared, or decided to take a break from serving the needs of the Anglos?

Mexican film director Sergio Arau has taken the thought as the starting point for his film Un Día Sin Mexicanos (A Day Without Mexicans). “On May 14,” runs the poster’s tagline, “there will be no Mexicans in California.” The tagline for the Spanish language version of the poster reads: “Los gringos van a llorar” (“The gringos are going to cry”).

The film, based on a short of the same name by the same director, sees California waking up one day to find a third of its population has disappeared. “Have they been taken by extraterrestrials?” asks one expert. “Is it the Apocalypse, and they are the chosen ones?” Or perhaps they have simply tired of not being valued.

The director, making his feature debut, is clear that this is a tragicomedy with a message: “The film is a cry that we want to be visible and we want to be valued,” he told a press conference at the Iberamericano festival of cinema in Guadalajara, where the film won three prizes.

And, despite the title, the film is not only talking about Mexicans. The term Mexican is used, the director explained, because to most north Americans, anyone from south of the border is a Mexican, be they Guatemalan, Honduran, or Peruvian.

Strangely, the film has received virtually no coverage in the English-language media. But in the Spanish-language media there is a storm brewing. Weblogs (for example, see www.blog.com) are busy with Mexicans -- both from Mexico and further south -- debating the points raised by the premise of the movie.

Let the Mexicans come home, says Cool, in his posting on one weblog. The north Americans are clever: they’ll find someone else to do the work. And anyway, there’s a shortage of labor in Mexico, and if these people are so industrious they can do the work and leave people like me to spend hours every day on the internet.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, responds Nina. You think the north Americans want to do this work themselves?

Another posting recounts an effort a few months ago to stage a one-day strike of Mexicans in California. The writer claims to have taken the day off work, but most of his acquaintances, threatened with the sack, went to their jobs. The impact of the day of action was, at best, minimal.

Whatever the merits of the film, Arau, the son of veteran director Alfonso Arau and a popular star in Mexico before he moved to the US 12 years ago, has made his point.

“My personal experience of moving to the US and not speaking the language, and thus becoming a minority for the first time at 41 is in the film 100 percent,” Arau told another blog, www.sensoryoverload.typepad.com. “Crossing the border seemed to delete all my past professional achievements. I experienced discrimination first hand. The minute most people here heard an accent, a Mexican accent that is, they figured it was too much work and probably not a good investment of their time to get to know me. So instead of spending time and money in therapy, I invested a lot of my time and somebody else’s money on filmmaking.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

back to top

A war beyond borders

By najwa

May 19 (AGR)— We are at war. A war that is much bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan. A war that is beyond any national borders, because this war in not being waged against governments. We are in a war that will not end with the capture of an aged and shaggy-bearded dictator. We are suffering and dying in a war that is being waged against all humanity, against all the Earth. Welcome to the Fourth World War.

As I sat down to watch Big Noise’s latest film, a friend stopped by and asked the name of the movie I was about to watch. “Fourth World War,” I replied. She asked if it were fiction. “No,” I answered, “It’s a documentary.” As we sit in our homes, watching our televisions, eating our food, and passing the days along as we normally do in this country, it is difficult to believe that we are in the midst of a new world war. But as the film, Fourth World War, clearly shows, a difficulty in comprehension does not equate to a lack of reality.

The films producers and its narrators, Michael Franti and Suheir Hammad, take us on a journey throughout the world to show us the faces of those that are most directly affected by the war. But rather than focusing on the disempowering and depressing realities of a war torn world, Big Noise also takes our hand and helps us to open a window – a window that not only reveals the desperate reality that we face, but also the encouraging and joyous movements that are working to stop this deadly war. But as the narrators inform us in the beginning of the film, this is not a tour. It is not possible to share 500 years of struggle in the time span of a movie. This is a primer, an introduction to reality.

Although the producers are quick to point out that this is not a recent war, that, in fact, it started long ago with imperialism, they are bringing to our attention the war on people and their environment that was started with the rise of neoliberalism in the mid- to late- twentieth century.

The film starts in Argentina. As Argentina was being touted as a poster child for neoliberalism and the policies of the IMF, its thin façade of success was soon to be ripped wide open. By procuring billions of dollars in external debt from the IMF, Argentina was able to share in a financial success that rivaled that of the United States of America. Then, in December of 2001, the economy collapsed. Banks stopped the majority of people from being able to withdraw their money. In essence, the middle class’s savings had been erased by the government and the IMF. Needless to say, uproar followed closely behind. On the Dec 19 and 20, millions of people took to the streets of Argentina – bankers, sanitation workers, unemployed, students, whites, indigenous, mestizos, old, young. In the following week, four governments would resign from office – unable and unwilling to handle the crisis the nation faced. The people, however, didn’t want the government. Nor, as they would prove, did they need them.

Next, the film goes to Chiapas, Mexico. The struggle of the indigenous Mayan people of Chiapas became known throughout the world on the day that NAFTA was signed into effect. Only hours after the agreement was signed the Zapatistas, a Mayan army, took to the streets in a war against what they called “a death sentence.” The Mayan people are no strangers to struggle against outside forces. For 500 years they have fought off foreign invaders. To them, they were already dying. Their struggle on the first of January 1994 was not, as they say, a struggle for control, it was a way to die with dignity, rather than to die forgotten. Their struggle, although far from over, has proven to be a successful and inspiring one for millions of people throughout the world. The film shows one of the many successes of the Zapatistas, which was to drive a heavily-armed occupying military base out of a small indigenous town using nothing but their words – first they shouted, then they sang, then the soldiers cried and abandoned the base that very afternoon.

The Zapatistas struggle because, in Chiapas, 70 percent of the population lives in poverty; forty-seven percent live in extreme poverty and starvation. Everyday, their lands are stolen by the government and then sold or given to corporations. Their homes are burned. And their people are killed. But the film goes far beyond the western hemisphere. It takes us to South Africa, where political apartheid was abolished in 1994, but where the controlling economic system has stayed the same. The new “democracy” in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), signed its first World Bank loan shortly after its rise to power. With the loan came structural adjustment programs responsible for the slashing of the most progressive constitution in the world, which guaranteed a right to water, housing, and electricity. The new loan, and ensuing structural adjustment, forced eight million people into homelessness and tens of thousands of people every month have their water and electricity cut off because the program forced the government to privatize its social services.

We also find ourselves in South Korea. Where a midnight gathering of the controlling parliamentary party, with the opposition party absent, convened on Dec. 26, 1996 and passed a new National Labor Law and National Security Law to kick off structural adjustment within the country. Later that day, the KCTU workers’ union called for an indefinite general strike, which would become the world’s first mass workers struggle against corporate globalization.

Footage from Palestine shows us the horrible atrocities that are being committed against the Palestinian people. On June 19, 2002, 50 Israeli tanks reoccupied the city of Jenin. The military proceeded to round up and arrest all men between the ages of fifteen and fifty. But many more suffered fates worse than arrest. Since Sept. 2001, the Israeli army has killed one child every three days. Thousands are killed by gun shots, buried alive while their homes are bulldozed by the Israeli army, or starve to death after everything they own, including their crops, are destroyed.

But all is not lost. In the streets of Argentina, the people are organizing themselves to provide food, jobs, housing, and so much more to their neighbors. They are creating a new government, one that is horizontal and sustainable. In Chiapas, the Zapatistas are taking back their land. They are building schools and planting new crops. They are fighting neoliberalism. In South Africa, the people are turning on their own water and electricity. They are fighting against the mass evictions. They are dancing in the streets. The workers are fighting for their lives in South Korea. Fifteen million people throughout the world, the largest global protest in the history of the world, marched against the US war in Iraq. Thousands of Americans (and I use Americans in the broad, inclusive sense) gathered in Quebec to protest the FTAA meeting, which would have expanded the powers of NAFTA with an additional 31 countries in the western hemisphere. In Palestine, children still play. They find reasons to smile. Neighbors share with one another. Survival becomes resistance.

George W. Bush said, “The entire world is a battlefield.” Fourth World War urges us to ask, where did this war begin? How can we stop it? Everyone with a shred of humanity will find a tear swell in their eye as they watch this film. Whether it is from the sadness that comes from seeing a young Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military or the joy that comes from seeing a young South African dancing and singing in the street to stop the mass evictions, you will feel the tear… if there is any feeling left at all.


The Fourth World War shows at 7 and 9pm May 27 at the Fine Arts Theater. Tickets ($5-$20) available at the Fine Arts Theater and through Mountain Eye Media. A portion of the proceeds benefit the Asheville Global Report. Info: 254-5580.

back to top