Gangs and Globalization:

I. Introduction to the Processes of Globalization and Urbanization
Introduction
Gangs organize and operate in marginalized urban spaces. Globalization has dramatically altered the characteristics and processes of urbanization and the study of gang formation must incorporate this shift into its theoretical framework.   Urban centers have been shaped by globalization. By studying the changes these urban centers have undergone from pre-industrialization to post-industrialization, one may also understand the transformation gangs have undergone.  This paper addresses how “the restructuring of cities, due to globalization and de-industrialization,”   created a social space conducive to the formation and proliferation of gangs and gang activity.

Theoretical Framework for Globalization
Globalization is a process of global integration that is fueled by the expansionist thrust of capitalism.   Capitalism in the modern global economy is characterized by “an increased interconnectedness or interdependence [due to] a rise in transactional flows and an intensification of such processes so that the world is becoming” increasingly interconnected.   Production centers and agglomerated centers of production are characteristic of the processes of globalized capitalistic expansion. In this way, urban centers have become “centers for the servicing, managing and financing of international trade investment and headquarter operations” and “in this sense they are strategic “production” [centers] for today’s leading economic sectors.”   Gangs form and operate in these urban centers, and therefore operate in an environment shaped by globalization.

The Downgrading of the Manufacturing Sector
Globalization has dramatically altered the structure of the world’s labor market. The global economy relies on a block of highly educated labor and in urbanized areas high-skilled labor has replaced manufacturing as the mainstay of the economy. Off shoring and the precipitous drop in the cost of manufactured goods due to global supply of cheap and un-unionized labor has led to the downgrading of the manufacturing sector. Due to the retreat of the manufacturing sector and the rise of high-tech markets, globalization has been characterized by a polarization of labor and wages. The result of this restructuring of the urban economy and labor market has been to create a “hour-glass shaped class structure which consists of a large number of high-end, high-skilled jobs on one end of the hour-glass, and low-end, low skilled service jobs on the other.”
Because of the new stratification of the labor market, globalization has widened the divide between high and low skilled labor, and by extension, the divide between the middle and lower classes. The “polarization of the occupational and class structures caused by the creation and production of the global economy” has created  “high end work in the producer service industries on the one hand and low-end work in consumer services on the other.”   The devaluing of low skilled labor has been a problematic, and in the case of gang proliferation, a dangerous, side effect of globalization. There is a large sector of the population that has become  “increasingly excluded from the major processes that fuel economic growth in the new global economy.”
The end of Fordism and manufacturing marked the disappearance of what had traditionally been a bridge between low—skilled labor and middle class mobility.   Unskilled urban dwellers that traditionally would have occupied manufacturing positions are now forced to work low wage jobs with little or no hope of upward mobility. Social theorists argue that it within the void left by the manufacturing labor market that gangs have proliferated. The global informal marketplace has created an alternative labor market to employ unskilled urban youth across the globe.

Marginalization and the Proliferation of the Informal Economy
The Global Drug Trade:

Globalization is not simply an expansion of capitalism and a facilitation of exchanges, it is also a force that shapes and divides the world’s labor market. Because of globalization’s influence over the world’s labor markets, it is “important politically and theoretically to recover the connections between global dynamics, places, and the growing inequality evident in major parts of the world.”
Gangs and gang life exist within the global space of expansionist capitalism, and occupy the marginalized spaces created by the scarcity of middle class manufacturing labor markets. The vacuums in the labor market left by globalization are filled by an informal economy, and gangs have risen to fill the void.  The lack of meaningful employment has led unskilled urban dwellers to “increasingly seeking meaning and identity in their lives outside of the sphere of regular work.”   The seemingly unbridgeable divide between skilled and unskilled labor markets have lead many urban youth to seek social integration and employment in the informal economy. The informal economy offers social status and upward mobility that the formal sector, with its dead-end minimum wage jobs, does not.  Just as globalization has rapidly proliferated in urban centers, so too has “the criminal underground economy…partly supported by the resources of the city and the effective demand by its expanding high income professional class for drugs.”
The informal and criminal economy has “been estimated by the UN as grossing more than four hundred billion US$ annually, which would make it the largest market in the world.”  Research on gangs “describe[s] drug-dealing gangs as the main street-level employer of youth in the poorest areas of cities,” effectively replacing the manufacturing sector as the employer of choice for unskilled laborers.  The participation of gangs, and particularly gangs working trans-nationally, in the sale and distribution of illicit drugs connects them with global economy. Gang involvement in drug trafficking is rampant and  “a 1999 survey of 1,385 police agencies …found that 43% of all drug sales in reporting agencies involved gang members.”
The informal economy rivals the formal economy in size, and, like its legal counterpart, operates on a global scale with centers of production and consumption. The drug trafficking sector mimics the formal economy in its organization. Similar to the formal economy, drugs are cheaply produced in third world countries like Afghanistan and Bolivia, and then transported, packaged and distributed in urban centers with high levels of skilled workers and capital (See Map above).

Gang Proliferation, Drug Trafficking, and the Onset of Globalization:
Gang participation in the global drug trade was relatively low before the onset of intense globalization that occurred in the 1980s. The boom in global trade in the 1980s coincided with a boom in crack-cocaine sales, and marked the beginning of the “crack epidemic” in urban centers across the United States. Crack-cocaine, a cheaper derivative of cocaine, became widely used in urban U.S. ghettos in the 1980s, and the drug was predominantly sold and distributed by gangs. The crack epidemic was, for most gangs, their first foray into a profitable and global drug market. Gang participation in the global drug trade further distanced them from their pre-industrial and pre-globalization predecessors. The “participation of gangs in the drug economy [was] relatively unheard of in the industrial era” and “the addition of the economic function to the gang creates a new gang form in the post-industrial economy: the drug gang.”

Distinctions between pre-and-post industrial gangs:
The processes of globalization and its impact on the economy and labor market have shaped the way that modern gangs operate. Post-industrial and post-Fordist gangs differ from their predecessors in size, scope and organizational capacities. The industrial era gangs were smaller than contemporary gangs, and their demographic was younger and more transient as the majority of members were expected to mature out of the gang. Industrial gangs were also localized in urban areas, whereas contemporary gangs, while concentrated in cities, also have footholds across rural and suburban geographies.
In addition, modern gangs are markedly more violent, more involved in drug trafficking, more durable, and more connected to the global criminal economy.   The connection between gangs and an international informal economy makes them key players in an illegal and globalized capitalistic system. The drug trade, as explained earlier, is global in scope just like other markets, and gang involvement in the trade makes them important participants in a complex and profitable global market.
The introduction of technologies like the Internet has also dramatically altered gang activity, and has made it so “even small, resource poor organizations and individuals can become participants in global networks.”   The Internet has allowed gang culture, distinguishable and markedly different from gang activity, to proliferate and globalize in a way never before seen in the industrial age.

II. The Globalized Gang: Hyper Locality and Globalization in Modern Gangs
Transnational gangs, and in particular MS-13, are at once hyper-local and global in scope. Before exploring the spatial space occupied by gangs, it is important to define what is meant when speaking of gangs. Malcolm Klein offers the following definition of gangs and specifies what and whom the label “gang” encompasses:
“Any identifiable group who: a. are generally perceived as a distinct aggregation by others in their neighborhood, b. recognize themselves as a denotable group, c. involved in enough delinquent acts to draw a nearly unanimous negative reaction from surrounding community and law enforcement.”

In attempting to understand the inner workings of gang activity and gang participation, it is important to explore the reasons why individuals join gangs. To this end, “it is notable that “surges in gang activity often accompany population shifts, regardless of whether migrants are foreign-born of native.”   This has been true not only in post-industrial gangs, but also for 19th century Irish and Italian street gangs, and for African American gangs that formed in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies as southern blacks migrated west.  Gangs form in transitory and marginalized communities whose members search for a sense of collective identity and belonging.  The connection between migration and gang proliferation is important to consider when studying contemporary gangs.  Globalization has been characterized by an upsurge in migration and transient populations, and the current gang epidemic is best understood as being directly related to large numbers of unassimilated and marginalized immigrants and migrants, not just within the United States, but globally.  MS-13, as will be further explored, has increased its ranks by tapping into the large numbers of unassimilated, or under-assimilated, immigrants that transverse Central and North America.

Hyper Locality and the Globalized Gang

“Globalization and street gangs exist in a paradox: Gangs are a global phenomenon not because the groups themselves have become transnational organizations (although a few have), but because the recent hyper-mobility of gang members and their culture. At the same time that globalization isolates neighborhoods heavily populated with gangs, it also helps spread gang activity and culture.”               Gang World Andrew V. Papachristos

Gang life and structure is at once hyper-local and global in its nature. One on hand, gang activity is hyper-local, and due to gang turf battles many gang members live out their entire existence within a three to five mile radius. This is due principally to the inherent danger gang members face if they choose to venture outside of their turf and into unfriendly territory- territory dominated by another gang. So, in this regard, gang members are tied to an extremely limited geographic space in their day-to-day activities.
Gang members, on the other hand, are from all over the world, and the demographics of rank and file gang members reflect a globalized population. As will be explored in the case study on the Mara SalvaTrucha, gang members can only be studied in a transnational framework, as they are a primarily migrant and immigrant population with roots in Central, South and North America.
Gang culture, on the other hand, is fully globalized due to copycat gangs and the Internet. The exportation of these criminal identities has allowed gang culture to spread to all corners of the globe.

III. Case Study: MS-13
The Mara Salvatrucha operates trans-nationally across North, Central and South America in countries like the United States, El Salvador Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico. Beyond the Mara Salvatrucha’s strongholds in cities across the Americas, the gang’s involvement in illicit drug dealing and human trafficking connects it to an ever wider web of illegal activity, one that spans the globe and encompasses opium growers in Afghanistan and cocaine producers in Bolivia.
Although the gang is often envisioned as a Central American phenomenon that has been exported to U.S. cities, the Mara Salvatrucha (also know as “MS-13”) originated in Los Angeles, California and was born out of transnational political and social processes. To understand MS-13 and its current status as a transnational gang, one must begin with the gang’s violent origins- the Salvadoran Civil War.

The Salvadoran Civil War
For most of the twentieth century a group of fourteen families owned all of the land in El Salvador. The inequitable distribution of land, combined with the Salvadorian economy’s reliance on agricultural exports and a large class of peasants, created a situation of extreme social discontent. In 1932 there was a bloody uprising known to Salvadorans as  “La Matanza” in where twenty-five thousand peasants and farmers were murdered by the ruling government.
In 1980 a civil war erupted between right-wing militant government and leftist guerilla rebels that left over seventy thousand people dead.   The civil war pitted the U.S.-backed government against leftist guerillas who had formed a coalition known as the Farabundo Matri National Liberation Front (“FMLN”). The Civil War was infamously violent and human rights abuses were rampant on both side of the struggle. Thousands of civilians were killed, tortured and disappeared, and child soldiers were common foot soldiers in the battle.
Massive amounts of aid was given to the Salvadoran military by the US in the fight against communism. The U.S. government was intimately involved in the Salvadoran Civil War, which would become its largest counter-insurgency war against left-wing guerrillas since the Vietnam War.   In their zeal to stamp out communism, the United States government trained and financed an army that kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of women, children and elderly Salvadorans.

Migration and the Formation of MS-13:  Searching for Identity in the Ghetto
Refugees
The Salvadoran Civil War displaced nearly one million people, about half of whom entered the United States as refugees (The Salvadoran Americans
By Carlos B. Cordova, page 16).  Many of the received refugees were former guerilla recruits and child soldiers. When confronted with local U.S. gang like the Bloods, Crips and Calle-18 (A Mexican-American gang), Salvadoran immigrants banded together for protection. Because of their training in the Civil War, MS-13 proved to be an extremely violent gang and quickly became notorious, feared and respected in Los Angeles. The experiences Mara Salvatrucha gang members shared as former child soldiers made the Mara Salvatrucha’s execution killings, kidnappings and torture more grisly than what had previously been seen in U.S. cities.      Ernesto Miranda, AKA Smokey, a co-founder of the Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles, was a former soldier in El Salvador’s civil war. Miranda has left the gang life and now works to keep kids out of gangs. He explains that the Mara Salvatrucha’s brutality stemmed from their training as soldiers during the Civil War. “In [El Salvador], we were taught to kill our own people, no matter if they were from your own blood. If your father was the enemy, you had to kill him”, Miranda explains, “so the training we got during the war in our country served to make us one of the most violent gangs in the United States.”

Deportation and the spread of the Mara Salvatrucha:  unforeseen consequences of U.S. Immigration Policies

A negotiated settlement between the El Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Matri National Liberation Front ended the El Salvadorian Civil War in 1992, after twelve long years of war. As the region began to stabilize, the United States started sending Central American refugees back home. The U.S. immigration and Naturalization Service deported four to five thousand people per year back to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The return of Salvadoran refugees to Central America marked the beginning of a United States immigration policy of deportations that inadvertently spread the scope of the Mara Salvatrucha. Beginning in “mid-1990s, U.S. immigration policy has dramatically boosted the proliferation of gangs throughout Latin America and Asia by deporting tens of thousands of immigrants with criminal records back to their home countries each year, including a growing number of gang members.”   In 2003 nearly eighty thousand immigrants were deported back to their countries of origin after being arrested for having committing a crime. (Id.) Many of these immigrants who were deported had never lived outside of the United States and knew little of their countries of origin.
The deportation process untaken by the U.S. government was poorly planned and executed, and deportees were sent to countries they knew little or nothing of with no programs or support networks to assist them upon arrival.   Many deportees fell into crime upon arriving in Central America , and El Salvadorian jails proved fertile ground for former gang members and disenfranchised youth to band together and organize local chapters of the Mara Salvatrucha in Central America.
Extreme poverty, unemployment and lack of resources in Central America led larger and larger numbers of youth to join the Mara Salvatrucha. “The cycle seems without end,” says Mandalit del Barco, a reporter for NPR, “children of Central America’s bloody wars immigrated to the U.S., where they became violent gang members, then [were] deported back to Central America to begin another generation.”   The legacy of the Mara Salvatrucha is one of self-perpetuating violence. It is a violence caused by war, by migration, by the global economy and the conditions of social exclusion it has created in many Central American and American cities.

The Organizational Structure of the Mara SalvaTrucha
MS-13 provides its members with street protection, refuge from home, an alternative family, and financial security. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha come from broken homes, which is a common social phenomenon these days due to the constant cycle of immigration and deportation occurring between the United States and Central America.
The members of MS-13 and other transnational gangs fall into the gap between national identities, straddling both worlds, and sometimes belonging in neither.
The Mara Salvatrucha, like other highly organized gangs, is able to persist and replicate itself despite changes in leadership and has an organization complex enough to sustain multiple roles for its members and is able to adapt to changing environments without dissolving.   Most members are very young and children are recruited as young as eight and nine years old. Although there is a trend of leaders staying longer terms in the gang, with some members remaining in the gangs well into their forties, the influx of younger members keeps median low.
Like all social and economic organizations shaped by globalization, the Mara Salvatrucha is both globalized and hyper-local. For instance, “in the United States, [the gang] used the colors blue and white (color of the Salvadoran flag) to identify its territory” and “in El Salvador, gang members ‘mark the highly localized territory of their barrios with the insignia of Los Angeles’s telephone area code and street numbers.”   There is a simultaneous pull towards expansion and hyper-locality within the gang culture.

Process for joining gang:
Allen Corporan of New York University describes a step-by-step description of the Mara Salvatrucha’s initiation process for new recruits:
1) First there is a preliminary initiation period where prospective gang members hang out with current, active,    gang members, but are not yet integrated in the gang.
2) If the individual chooses, after the initiation period, that he or she would like to join the gang, they are “jumped in” for 13 seconds. In this stage, they are relentlessly beaten, kicked in the head and stomach, and punched by other gang members.
3) The recent recruit must then go on a mission to prove his or her dedication to the gang. Sometimes this step can be as simple as a robbery or act of vandalism, but sometimes it involves the murder of a rival gang member, rape, or the kidnapping and murder of a civilian.
4) After the new gang member has completed the task assigned to them, they are given a code-name to use in the gang,
5) Once an individual has been initiated into the gang, very hard to leave. Gang members often die young due to the violent nature of their activities, and vendettas placed upon them by other gangs. Another reason why members stay in the gang until they are die is because leaving the gang is often punishable by death.

Mara Salvatrucha’s Involvement in the Global Informal Economy:
As previously stated in the section regarding gang participation in the informal economy, there is a tremendous amount of money to be made drug trafficking and other illicit markets. The Mara Salvatrucha is engaged in a wide array of globalized criminal activity including “drug dealing, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, immigrant smuggling, prostitution rings, automobile theft, stolen documents and document falsification.”   The crimes the Mara Salvatrucha engage in occur in a trans-national framework. For instance, stolen car sales between the United States and countries Central America are part of a prosperous and thriving illicit market. And, as mentioned previously, the drug trafficking market is highly globalized.
The Mara Salvatrucha also tap into the business of human trafficking and exploit the situations of immigrants desperate to enter the United States. The Mara Salvatrucha has become actively involved in human trafficking, and has a monopoly on smuggling immigrants across the U.S./Mexican border. When “MS-13 moved into Mexico, the gang started to kill immigrants who did not use gang-affiliated coyotes, and thus monopolized the market.”   The gang’s involvement in border smuggling also allows them to smuggle deported gang members back into the United States.

Policy Approaches:
Government policies aimed at addressing the global pandemic of gang activity have been largely unsuccessful, and many have inadvertently perpetuated gang membership. Policies defined by zero tolerance, deportation and incarceration have had the unfortunate side effect if advancing and furthering gang activity.
Governments face substantial obstacles when trying to combat international gang activity. For one thing, gangs, unlike governments, are not defined or contained within a fixed geographic area.   Combating global criminal networks also brings up the problems of state sovereignty and the difficulties inherent in coordinating a coordinated international response. Gangs are also fluid, ground level, highly adaptable formations and they “pit bureaucracies against networks.”
Gangs also “pit governments against market forces,”   As mentioned in the section on drug trafficking, there are strong forces of market demand and supply that fuel and drive the informal economy.

The Honduran Response and “Mano Dura” Policies
The Honduran government has taken a hardline stance against gangs and their members. In 2003 the Honduran president, Ricardo Rodolfo Maduro, and the Honduran Congress passed legislation that took aim at  the Mara Salvatrucha and its members. In a bold move, “Maduro and the Honduran Congress added the crime of ‘illicit association’ to Article 332 of the Honduran penal code, making it illegal to belong to a mara.”   The hard-line policies of the Honduran government have ushered in a period of social cleansing and mass incarceration. These concerns have been voiced by a former Honduran Supreme Court Judge who argued that “in penal justice you punish someone for what they do, not who they are” and in the case of Mano Dura, “youth [is] being punished for who they are even if they haven’t really committed a crime.”
Beside the ethical thorniness of the Mano Dura policies, the policies have had limited and uneven success in curbing gang activity. While some crimes like kidnappings and robberies have decreased, other crimes, like murders, have risen by seventeen percent.   Mano Dura policies have also resulted in mass incarcerations, leading to overcrowding in prisons.  The “percentage of prisoners awaiting sentencing is …distressing: 78.5% of prisoners [in Honduras] have yet to go before a judge, compared to 18.8% in the U.S.”
The anti-gang policies adopted by the Honduran government have had limited success because they do not address the causes of membership. Gangs find their members in populations that suffer from social exclusion and a dearth of employment opportunities. Because of this, the gang problem will never be abated through penal measures alone.

III. Conclusion:
The Mara Salvatrucha and other global gangs are products of urbanization. Contemporary urban spaces and patterns of migration are shaped by globalization, and because of this gangs must be studied through a globalization-oriented framework. Policies aimed at abating gang violence must address the polarized societal conditions that globalization has helped to create. It is these processes of exclusion and polarization that lead young adults and children to join the gang in the first place. Policies focused on alleviating poverty and providing employment would, in the long run, prove more effective than penal measures. As long as social exclusion, dire economic conditions, and lack of opportunity exist, there will always be new recruits for the Mara Salvatrucha. The attraction for low-skilled and migrant populations to join the informal, criminal market, fueled by polarizing nature of globalization and capitalistic expansion, must be addressed when designing gang control policies.

GlobalizationPaper

In recent years we have witnessed the most aggressive dismissal and corrosion of some of our nations’ (and the world’s) most treasured institutions by the U.S. government. The brazen and impertinent appointment of John R. Bolton to the United Nations sent a clear message to the U.N. and to the world that the United States was not interested in bilateral discussions. Such an affront to a reputable and honored establishment did not go over quietly, with Bolton fanning the fire with ostentatious statements such as: “if the UN secretary building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” and publicly expressing his view that the United States is not bound, like other countries, by international laws and treaties. Not exactly a stellar candidate to represent the United States.

The appointment of questionable candidates to represent important and time-honored organizations is something that has recently become characteristic of the United States. This past week, Leon Drolet, chairman of the campaign to end affirmative action in Michigan University admissions and public sector hiring, was appointed to be the chairman of Michigan’s state advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights decried the appointment, stating that “the U.S. Commission has all but erased its credibility as a proponent for human rights” and that it was “disappointing that the U.S. Commission on Human Rights chose a representative with such a shallow civil rights résumé.”

Drolet follows a series of questionable appointments to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights by the current administration. Perhaps the most controversial appointment has been Gerald A. Reynolds, who is famous for his staunch opposition to Affirmative Action and his position that racial discrimination is not behind the disparities in unemployment, wages, disease, education, and housing that face people of color. Reynolds stance is that minorities are to blame for all the problems they face, and that if they only had a “bootstraps” mentality, their situation would improve, and that institutional racism is a “historic” issue. Reynolds is also a former member of the ironically named “Center for Equal Opportunity,” a conservative think tank that promotes “colorblind public policies,” including the elimination or curtailment of existing racial preference and affirmative action programs. Reynolds’ dismissal of structural and institutional racism shifts the blame from the causes and perpetrators of racism to its victims.

Reynolds has described himself, saying: “I am not a civil rights activist…I’ve never been a civil rights activist.” This is eerily reminiscent of Bolton’s public affirmations that he, also, had no faith or background in the work of the organization he has been elected to represent. The appointment of Reynolds, Bolton, and other objectionable candidates is almost certainly meant to be read as a rebuke to the U.N. and the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights—organizations that have been highly critical of both the U.S. governments’ domestic and international policies.

Wade Henderson, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that these appointments “[signal] the end of the commission as an independent voice for the protection of civil and human rights.” This trend is threatening to the very principles that the U.N. and the U.S. Commission on Human Rights are built upon and stand for. Without equal participation, non-partisan representation, and an agenda that is focused on stopping human and civil rights abuses and not promoting one party’s, or one country’s, agenda, the organizations lose their value and credibility.

Perhaps even more unsettling is that through the appointment of members who oppose affirmative action and have poor, or nonexistent, civil rights records, we are effectively tightening the grip of structural racism on people of color living in the United States. The policies and studies that will be undertaken by the very organizations that are meant to protect civil liberties and promote racial justice will instead cater to an ideology that is dismissive of structural racism and hostile to disadvantaged minorities. The most recent additions to the U.S. Civil Rights Committee have made it clear that they do not believe in structural violence. It is highly probable that this will shift the focus of the studies, policies, and practices of the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights. We need the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights to reflect the needs and concerns of people of color in the United States. Instead, the Committee has been changed to reflect an ideology that will work against minorities, blaming them for their problems, rather than offering them the bipartisan assistance they need.

This is a real problem for the Civil Rights and Racial Justice Movements in this country. Weakening organizations that could hold the United States’ government accountable for their colossal failures at creating, maintaining, or respecting human rights and civil liberties is a troubling trend for people of color in the United States and the global community. The damage done to civil and human rights organizations that have been built upon years of activism and struggle is not only an affront to our rights, but to our history. If the United States government does not change its hostile and untrusting treatment of organizations such as the U.N. and the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights, the appointment of questionable representatives and board members will be viewed as nothing more Trojan horses.

And if we, as a people, allow this trend to continue, we will be left with no dependable or credible organizations to protect people of color against structural and institutional racism.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog on June 13, 2007 www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

The deaths of two immigrants this past week under U.S. custody have raised questions regarding the treatment of detainees. The recent deaths come at the heels of a report released in July stating that 62 detainees had died while in U.S. custody since 2004. Edmar Alves Araujo, an illegal immigrant from Brazil, died Tuesday in Rhode Island shortly after being detained by U.S. immigration officials. His sister claims she desperately tried to deliver the penicillin that would have saved her epileptic brother’s life, but was turned away by police officers. And earlier this week Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, a legal permanent resident facing deportation for a felony drug conviction, died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in Texas after being hospitalized earlier this week with leg pain. She was seven weeks pregnant.

The deaths of two detainees in one week is deeply troubling and points to an overcrowded immigration detention system that is relying excessively on incarceration as a means of border control. The very idea of detaining undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no previous criminal record, is morally questionable. But beyond this these programs are terribly under funded which means that regardless of whether or not they are viable forms of immigration control, they do not have the financial nor organizational backbone to function properly. So regardless of whether one agrees with the tactics of incarceration and raids, no one could approve of the way these detention centers are being run. It is classic bureaucratic fumbling that has become sadly characteristic of the current administration. The York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year “The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care.” Not only have we created an inhumane and criminalizing method of dealing with undocumented immigrants, we have managed to fumble how we run these questionable detention centers in the first place. Our inhumane and criminalizing process is incapable of properly maintaining and running itself, which then leads to even more human and civil rights abuses.

Beyond the lack of funding for these detention centers there is also a lack of administrative oversight and record keeping. Although raids on immigrant workers may seem like the work of an effective police force, the truth is far messier. Instead of a powerful government taskforce, the current detentions of undocumented immigrants are being carried out by a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not American citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them. There is no separate government body that is responsible for accounting for the lives or deaths of immigrants while in U.S. custody. Because of this, the mistreatment of undocumented immigrants is often unreported or is lost in a sea of red tape and bureaucratic disorganization.

Just this past month a mother was finally reunited with her mentally underdeveloped son who, although a legal citizen of the United States, was erroneously deported to Mexico where he lived by scavenging from trash cans and bathing in rivers. The U.S. immigration officials did not assist her in locating her son, and she needed to pay for the search out of pocket. This extreme case of both cruelty and dysfunctional management prove that the U.S. immigration control is at once wielding excessive power and excessive sloppiness.

It seems that the current administration’s cruel and racist policies are not much more than cardboard cut-outs of what they purport to be. They are only a chaotic mess of cronyism and xenophobia under the guise of a policy. No one should be happy with the current policy. Those who favor harsher anti-immigration policies should recognize that the current system is disjointed and inconsistent, with no clear record keeping or regulation. And those who support and advocate for immigrant rights should be upset at the lawlessness of the current system, the lack of accountability for human rights abuses, and the inhumane treatment of all those who are unlucky enough to be caught in this system, be them documented or not.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog

www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

On August 28^th federal agents and local police stormed into Chelsea, Somerville, and East Boston in search of suspected members of the infamous Salvadorian gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. The raid was in response to an escalating rise in violent crime in the area, which has mainly been attributed to gang related activity.

The presence of Federal Agents and men in uniform arresting Hispanic young men soon triggered a city wide reaction. Panic soon engulfed the city, leading many undocumented workers to go into hiding and sending documented workers scrambling home to get their papers. Law Enforcement teams insist they were searching for specific targets, and not interested in creating a situation of mass deportation. Customs spokesman Michael Gilhooly stated that “we don’t do random operations…we are targeting specific individuals who are a threat to public safety.”

However, advocacy groups have argued that many non-gang members have been swept up in the raid due to minor law infringements, including one young man being charged with deportation for a minor alcohol-related felony three years ago.

Although the Mara Salvatrucha is viewed by Americans as a Central American epidemic that has spread to its cities, the Mara Salvatrucha was actually born out of Los Angeles, when Salvadorian refugees were confronted with American gang culture. Threatened by both Mexican and Black gangs, the Salvadorian immigrants banded together for protection. Now, as convicted felons are being deported back to their countries of origins through tougher U.S. immigration policies, the Mara Salvatrucha have created strong holds across Central America, notably in El Salvador, where post-war instability and poverty proved created a fertile environment for the gang to win new recruits and establish itself. Ernesto Miranda, AKA Smokey, a co-founder of the Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles was a former soldier in El Salvador’s civil war and is now in El Salvador studying law and working to keep kids out of gangs. He explains that the Mara Salvatrucha’s brutality stemmed from their training as soldiers during the Civil War. “In [El Salvador], we were taught to kill our own people, no matter if they were from your own blood. If your father was the enemy, you had to kill him” Miranda explains, “so the training we got during the war in our country served to make us one of the most violent gangs in the United States.” The Mara Salvatrucha now operates without borders throughout Central America and the United States and is involved in a large range of criminal activities, such as drug dealing and carjacking.

“The cycle seems without end,” Mandalit del Barco, a reporter for NPR, says, “children of Central America’s bloody wars immigrated to the U.S., where they became violent gang members, then deported back to Central America to begin another generation.” And the extreme poverty, unemployment and lack of resources in Central America are leading more and more young children into the gangs.

The complicated nature of gangs and how they correlate to U.S. immigration and border culture is fascinating and chilling. As someone who has worked with homeless and at risk youth in Honduras, a strong hold of the Mara Salvatrucha, I can see the pitfalls to both victimizing the gang members and demonizing them. The legacy of the Mara Salvatrucha is one of self-perpetuating violence. It is a violence caused by war, by migration, by the global economy and the conditions of dire poverty it has created in many Central American cities, by unemployment, and by weak family support. The violence feeds into itself and creates more violence. There are a myriad of reason as to why young, often pre-adolescent, boys and girls are drawn into this gang and the savage brutality of the gang is not to be understated. I met with former Salvatrucha members in Honduras at Proyecto Victoria and although some of the boys could not have been more than fifteen, it was clear they had a violent past and carried with them many ghosts. By the time I had met them they had already turned their loves over to Jesus and repentance, the tattoos that covered their bodies and faces attested to their dark past. Some of the boys had killed over a half a dozen other gang members before reaching the age of ten, and reminded me of child soldiers, just like the founders of the Mara Salvatrucha were also child soldiers in the Civil War. They had learned to kill and torture before they could fully understand the moral implications of their actions.

However, it is important to understand is that there are varying degrees of involvement in gangs. About 70% of the children, ages seven to eighteen, at the Casa Alianza Covenant House in Honduras where I volunteered for four years bore some mark of gang involvement, oftentimes small, handmade tattoos bearing three points, or MS, or another gang sign. However, there was not one child at the orphanage who had been involved in major violent criminal activity (homelessness, glue addiction to stave off hunger, and petty crimes being the worse offenses for the majority of the children. Some of the girls had worked as child prostitutes to survive.) But the children themselves were being quickly killed off, often by off-duty police officers who banded together at night to rid the streets of the gang problem. So, although there are many Mara Salvatrucha members who have committed heinous crimes and deserve to be brought to justice, there are many innocent victims who are dragged into the fray. Many of the children I worked with committed no crime other than being born into abysmally poor households. Their marginal status in society forced them to band together with other homeless children to survive, but they were not murderers, despite their pen and ink tattoos they had given each other when they were eleven and twelve years old. They were just kids, desperate to find belonging and family. My work with Casa Alianza made me worried and afraid for the children I worked with when the new clampdown on gangs began in Central America- like the Mano Dura policies and new laws that would classify any person with a tattoo as a gang member.

There have been serious repercussions to Central America’s misguided gang prevention policy, namely that many innocents are pulled into the category of “criminal” or “violent” simply because they look or dress a certain way, or because they are young and homeless. It seems that the United States’ gang prevention has sadly gone down the same path. Although the raids in Boston have seen to be more targeted, the reaction of the Hispanics in town points to a population that is terrified of law enforcement, whether they have broken the law or not.

I strongly believe that if the Central American and United States governments were to focus on alleviating poverty, on providing employment, on providing basic health services and housing, it would do more to stop the gang wars than any amount of arrests or executions. As long as these dire economic conditions and lack of opportunity exist, there will always be new recruits for the Mara Salvatrucha.

There are two ways to define globalization; one being from a free market perspective in which globalization would begin in roughly the 1940’s with the spread of multi-national business, or by a more socio-historical definition in which globalization is viewed as the Western expansion beginning in 1500 and defined by expansionist or colonialist ambitions. By defining globalization as a period marked by an ethnocentric urgency to “civilize” other nations and peoples, then we are able to view the Spanish and Portuguese crusades, the British colonialism, and American Imperialism as all being variant forms of the same sort of outward expansion. The borders and nations that have resulted from globalization are rife with contestation, with the very idea of a colonial border carrying with it the weight of ethnocentrism, of cultural evolution (ala the philosopher Hegel) of the white mans burden and issues of internalized colonialism. Religion, slavery and genocide have all played important parts in formation of the modern word and its conflicts and globalization has created a situation where nationality and identity are transient and mutable terms.

The current form of the United States imperialism is at once isolationist and expansionist. The United States is closing its borders to Hispanic immigrants and all “brown” bodies while at the same time trying to create American style democracy in the Middle East. “Fighting them there so we don’t need to fight them here”, as explained by our current president. Because of these two policies we have created a society, media and government that effectively lumps together Hispanics and Arabs into one category: Brown bodies who threaten our White-Anglo-Saxon God Fearing, Freedom loving country. American expansionism and isolationism have worked together to vilify Brown bodies.

When my father and sister visited the Midwest shortly after 9-11 they were asked by several frightened strangers if they were Arab to which they replied that they were Hispanic. Gomez-Pena explains that “since 9/11, the semiotic territory encompassed by the word “terrorist” has expanded considerably. First it referred strictly to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, then to Muslim “fundamentalists,” until it engulfed all Muslims, and finally all Arabs and Arab-looking people.” And by Arab looking people, we are now referring to any ambiguously ethnic looking person, including the equally vilified “Illegals” or undocumented immigrants. The United States mainstream media and Government rhetoric are obsessed with maintaining the White strong hold and nothing terrifies them more than the inevitable “browning” of America by Mexican immigrants or the possibility of an Arab presence in America. Bill O’Reilly perhaps sums up the American xenophobia best in these two media clips:

O’REILLY: All right. There you go. White privilege. The browning of America. There it is. There it is. Bottom line on this? That’s what it is. Change the complexion of America. Have an open border where Hispanics, people who live in the Caribbean, people who live in Africa and Asia can walk in and become citizens immediately. And there you have the white power structure would decline, of course. Because the numbers of people coming here would be people of color. Right? That’s the hidden agenda.

And in an interview with John McCain:

Bill O’Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.

The result of the current anti-immigration and anti-Arab sentiment pervasive in the U.S. administrations rhetoric and parroted by the main stream media is that Brown Bodies have been dehumanized and Other-ed, seen as an invading and hostile force intent on “destroying America.” The implications of this are frightening. By demonizing all “Brown Bodies” the United States has effectively created a grouping of people who are seen as enemies, as sub-human, and disposable and dangerous. Looking back at history, this sort of Othering is what has lead to humanity’s most horrid atrocities. Genocides, slavery, and other brutal abuses all stem from a society that views a group of people as being less human then they are. The detainment of undocumented immigrants and the disappearances and torture of Arab peoples point to a society that condones the mistreatment of a particular sector. The terrible abuses against Arab and Central American bodies are met by the majority of the American people with silence, or worse- lauding.

Genocide and mass hate crimes are not, as we would like to believe, a result of power gone awry. They are rather a result of social pathology. Genocide can not happen with out the consensus of the people. It is group-think at its worse, it is the collective sense of hatred and need for violence that is felt by a society as a whole. Although it may seem alarmist to compare pre-genocidal societal behavior to the current political and cultural climate in the United States, the comparison is not terribly far off. The thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths that are so easily cleansed from our popular conscious are vividly accounted for by other nations who view our actions as imperialist and murderous. And the building of the Mexican American wall is seen by the international community as apartheid and reminiscent of both the Berlin Wall and the Israeli separation barrier. By taking a step back from our nation we can see that all of our actions amount to a racist policy of exclusion, dehumanization and violence.

The irony in the United States current predicament, or social illness, is that in seeking to protect our ‘American-ness”, we have effectively dismantled the nation’s foundation, broken down its crumbling infrastructure, made a mockery of our founding principles, and alienated ourselves from the rest of the world. Freedom can not coexist with pervasive and paralyzing fear, growth can not occur with isolationism, democracy can not function when the population is ignorant and terrified, and equality can not be achieved when part of the population is viewed as outsiders and enemies.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog

www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

The recent collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge is the last in a series of tragedies that point a crumbling and shoddy American infrastructure. It seems that for being a country of vast resources and technological innovation we are completely inept when it comes to providing our public with basic necessities such as roads, bridges, levees, health care, and emergency response. The failure of the levees in New Orleans was a gross failure of not American engineering, as we surely have the technology to build functional levees, but rather a failure of policy and intent. Providing safe infrastructure for our citizens has seemed to be on the backburner of the U.S. government’s priorities for decades now. The collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge is a sign that a long time policy of neglect and indifference has finally come home to roost, and that the policy of neglect has become so pervasive it is now affecting all Americans, not just primarily people of color, as was the case in New Orleans.

A recent article in the Washington Post explored the causes and effects of governmental neglect and incompetence. Reporter John McQuiad interviewed Former House speaker Newt Gingrich who explained the current predicament in public infrastructure and engineering as a “system-wide” government breakdown that includes health care, defense, intelligence and disaster response. It seems that whatever is pushing the engine of the American government has little to do with the needs of the American people or the needs of anybody who is not directly in the position to profit from the administrations crooked policies and practices.

There has been a tendency to call the United States sorely inadequate responses to disasters like Katrina “fumbled”, but our current situation is the result of something much more insidious. As McQuiad explains “Bush White House’s hostility toward the federal bureaucracy has been quite purposeful…[they have]…undermined the normal workings of agencies from the CIA to the Environmental Protection Agency, in part because they generate facts and opinions that conflict with political goals… the White House has also seeded the government with appointees chosen for loyalty and ideological affinity, not competence [and] all of this has taken a toll on agencies’ ability to process information, devise sound policies and communicate with the public.”

The collapse of our public infrastructure points to a governmental policy that is more invested in its own political goals and private financial gains than it is in the safety and wellbeing of their citizens. The death and destruction wrought by Katrina was completely avoidable, and it is shocking that such a blatant failure of engineering was constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers of the most powerful country in the world.  It leads us to ask where our priorities are, if they are not vested in the safety of our citizens or in the maintenance of our countries infrastructure and social services.

The collapse of the United States infrastructure is reflective of a government that is increasingly out of touch with the country it is governing. If the collapse of the Mississippi Bridge had occurred in France, or Italy, or England, or Spain, to name a few countries, there would have been mass protests against the party in power. If a structure of public mass transit collapses because of poor engineering, the blame rests upon the government. But in the United States there was not much of an uproar. The mainstream’s media, which has become increasingly compliant, focused on the bravery of those who helped victims and the sorrow of those who lost loved ones. There was little mention of things like anger, outrage, or protests against a government which would allow the American people to commute on structures they know are unsafe, not warn them, and then actively deny funding for repair. I would think the government is not acting for the people, because the “people” and the “government” have become so separate, they do react to the others needs or actions.

This leads us to the other issue of democratic participation. The disenfranchisement of people of color has proven to be an effective way to remove them from national politics. The removal of Black voters from the democratic process has worked to effectively silence their voices and needs. In order to have a country meet your demands, you must possess political weight, meaning that if the government does not meet your needs, you vote against them, and hence, cause the loss of their power. This is not the case in the United States. Because the government has disenfranchised many voters of color they have stripped them of their political weight, and in doing so the government has created a situation where they do not need to answer to the needs of the minority population and avoid taking responsibility for their “fumbled” policies.

It is important to draw the link between policy failures, broken infrastructure, and poor distribution of funding to voter disenfranchisement. There are reasons as to why the people most affected by the United States government’s dismal performance are also those who have been actively stripped of their voting power. If people of color were unimpeded voters, who voted in full numbers, then the United States government would be forced to change their policies or risk losing power. However, as things stand now, because of voter disenfranchisement and the silencing of voters of color, along with the compliant and servile media, the government has a carte-blanc to continue its inadequate, shortsighted, and profiteering ways.

What is so unfortunate is that we, as a nation, have allowed this policy to go on for so many decades. People of color have been suffering unduly under these policies of neglect and it has gone on unchecked for so many years that it has successfully eroded our nation’s foundation. What we can all learn as we watch American ingenuity crumble under a policy of neglect and corruption is that a government who neglects and disenfranchises one sector of its population is one that is neither truly democratic nor humanistic. The collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge should signal to the United States citizens that they have for too long condoned a policy of neglect.

Landings 5: Immigration, Modern Art and the Global Community

Art Show @ the Museum of the Americas

The exhibition Landings 5 is a group show featuring the work of thirty three artists from across Latin America. The show is located at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C. and will be up until early September. Curated by Joan Duran, the exhibition explores issues surrounding immigration, Diaspora, and “is an attempt to cross-fertilize current cultures and identities in a spirit of collaboration, celebration, inquiry and exploration.” The pieces, although often more successful conceptually than they are aesthetically, nevertheless provide an interesting artists-eye view into the phenomena of border shifting, cultural mixing, and the blending of popular iconography.

The show featured work that mixed popular symbols, objects, and icons from Latin America and the United States, respectively, to create pieces that were at once familiar and alien to the viewer. The promises and letdowns of immigrant dreams, the militarization of border control, the blending of cross-border kitsch pop cultures, satires of gender roles and cultural stereotypes are all themes explored by the artists in Landing 5. The show creates a space that is neither Latin America not the United States, but rather a hybrid of the two.

The pieces that worked perhaps most successfully were those that incorporated well known imagery or symbols and rearranged them to create works that, although familiar to the viewer, were unsettling and foreign. The pieces juxtaposed the traditional with the contemporary, Americana with Latin Americanism, old-world gender roles with feminism, white collar with blue collar, tourism with migration. The end results are pieces that employ the mundane to achieve the unusual, use pop culture to voice counter culture, and rework kitsch into high art.

Anyel Maidelin Calzadilla

(blue construction helmets hung against a wallpapered backdrop.)

The show also pointed to a new merging of cultures- the objects and images are familiar to us regardless of where we herald from in the Americas. The show was a great testament to how blended our visual language has become and how much globalism has impacted our interpretation of what otherwise would be thought of as exotic objects. There is nothing that is purely Mexican, just as there is nothing that is purely American- the borders may be built, reinforced, and militarized, but the cultural border have already been breached. Pop cultures in the Americas have bleed over to create something new, something uniquely post-modern.

Pieces like Adislen Reyes’ tiffany & cu played on the audience’s expectations and collective cultural knowledge. It is a piece that mixes humor with politics, low brow with high brow. The paper plates are delicately painted and arranged carefully.

The show would have perhaps benefited from more explanation as the pieces were often times much more theoretical than they were visually engaging. Many of the pieces would have been strengthened simply by having their titles labeled. The curater of the show obviously made a conscious decision to omit any written explanations. The only way to guide oneself through the tour was a floor plan of the space, numbered, with the artist’s names. It was not easy to use, and distracted from the experience of the space. A more thought out contextualization to the art, and a chance to hear the artist’s voices in addition to their visual presentation would have made the show meatier. Although the argument could be made that defining the pieces to the viewer may have fenced in dialogue and interpretation, I feel this was a show that would have worked better with a stronger curator presence. The meaning of many of the pieces was much clearer when the title was known.

For instance, one of the first pieces of the show was this series of three beautiful heads by artist Celeste Ponce. Although the piece is lovely as simply an aesthetic work, when the title is known it takes on new meaning:

Celeste Ponce o-e-a

The title of this piece is o-e-a. Given the context of the show the title allows for the work to take on a new and more profound meaning. The work goes from being an esoteric visual piece to being a politically charged commentary on language barriers and immigration.

Overall, the show was an interesting, although not groundbreaking, commentary on border culture and globalism.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

Guillermo Gomez-Peña has been shaking up the art scene for decades with his controversial pieces on the Mexican-American experience, xenophobia, exoticism, identity and border cultures. Never one to lose his edge, Gomez-Peña has recently been tackling the post-9-11 hysteria and xenophobia that has dramatically altered our national character. Addressing issues such as the demonization of “brown bodies” and the isolationism that has become worryingly characteristic of our country, president, and mainstream culture, Gomez-Peña crafts explicit in-your-face art pieces that integrate video, audio, spoken word and performance. Gomez-Peña ’s art work aims at creating dialogue, debate, and visibility about the issues surrounding the Mexican-American experience. His work is as beautiful as it is outraged, and in the era of fear and isolationism, he is an important voice of dissent.

Gomez Pena’s recent essay “Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference” allows for a contextualization of his performance pieces and is an important read for those new to his artwork. In his essay Gomez-Peña proves himself to be equal parts artist, activist, intellectual, and upstart. The anger is real, as is the near-genius intellectual clarity and piercing social and cultural analysis that comes through in this essay.Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference explores the notions of nativism, post 9-11 hysteria, isolationism, xenophobia, demonization, national security, and border culture through the lenses of a cross-cultural Mexican-American artist and activist. Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference makes for an excellent manifesto. It outlines, in ringing clarity, the cause and effects of our current state of affairs. National Security actually means security for White-Anglo-Saxons and insecurity for everyone else. He places the anti-immigration debate in the framework of American nativism- the American urge to cling to a white dominated society that actually never existed.

But not only is Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference a brilliant analysis of our culture, policies, and media, it is also a call to arms for all artists and thinkers. Gomez-Peña argues that it is up to artists to “question the discourse of power, and to contest the imposition of oppressive practices in the name of national governance.” Gomez-Peña writes that the “the master discourse [of today] embraces and promotes ultra-nationalism, isolationism, xenophobia, and censorship.” Gomez-Peña feels that the duty of artists “to make sure that borders and institutions remain open; and to cross those borders we are not supposed to cross. We, the artists and intellectuals—not politicians or soldiers—are the ones who must defend freedom and democracy.” His case is an ambitious and honorable one, and it is one that he has been personally pursuing for decades.Perhaps what is most brilliant about Gomes-Pena’s art work is that it holds a mirror up to American and Mexican culture and forces us to look into it. His work is firmly planted in mainstream culture, nothing is a fabrication. Rather, his pieces are exaggerations of current cultural and social trends. They are instigative and provocative because of their historical roots, their seed of truth. Gomez-Peña ’s performance pieces offer us a caricature of our own culture. They are painful to watch because we know that once the performance ends, the issues it presented to us do not.

In his satirical performance piece “El Mexterminator”, Gómez-Peña presented a “Living Diorama” where he interpreted the “Ethno-Cyborg”. He performed as a caricature of the imagined Mexican Male which has been created by the imagination of the internet users, i.e. Mexicans as machos, “Latin lovers”, bandidos, and other stereotypes. The piece, although comical, was a sharp rebuttal and criticism of the negative stereotypes that predominate mainstream media’s depiction of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Another work of Gomez-Peña ’s, Undiscovered Amerindians, curated and performed with fellow artist Coco Fusco, also mocked the West’s colonial inclinations and its exoticism of foreign cultures. In the performance Gomez-Peña and Fusco presented themselves as two specimens representative of the Guatinaui people. They displayed themselves in a ten-by -twelve-foot cage and dressed themselves in outrageous costumes while performing equally outlandish “native” tasks. Gomez-Peña dressed in an Aztec style breastplate, complete with a leopard skin face wrestler’s mask. Fusco, in some of her performances, donned a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, baseball cap, and sneakers. She also braided her hair, a readily identifiable sign of “native authenticity.”

Gomez-Peña explains that “in this project the Coco Fusco and I did a parody of the great traveling “multicultural” exhibitions of principles of the 1900, revealing their inherent political contradictions, by means of the violent juxtaposition, although comedian, of true pre-Columbian and colonial art, with examples of tourist art and contemporary conceptual work.”Fusco explained that the performance piece was a “reverse ethnography . . . Our cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game.”The audience interaction with the piece made it a work without boundaries. The piece did not end where the cage ended, it was continued both spatially and temporally through the reactions, behaviors and attitudes of those visiting and engaging with the performance.

Astoundingly, about half of the visitors who saw the performance piece believed that what they were witnessing was “real.”What is most poignant about Gomez-Peña ’s performance pieces is “the impossibility of an appropriate reaction… there is no tenable audience position…To buy into [the performances] at face value, when one should know better, is to fail dramatically [, and] to ‘play along’ with its subversiveness and to act out the role of gullible viewer that is already scripted by the performance is to test the moral limits of theatrical representation.” Because there is no appropriate or sanctified reaction to the performances, the audience is thrust into an uncomfortable position of both observer and participant. This type of audience engagement gives Gomez-Peña ’s performance art its notorious “bite”. It is impossible to ignore, and equally impossible to accept. By framing xenophobia, exoticism and Otherness through such a confrontational and instigative medium Gomez-Peña ’s message is not only heard, it is felt and lived by his audience.

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota

To state that the past is a foreign country one must separate his or her self from his or her own histories. But the past is generative of the present, the separation of the two can only be though on as an abstraction. We exist through, and because of, our pasts.

There are two notions of memory that may be postulated in this debate. The first is memory presenting itself through “acts of recollection or commemoration”, in what Tim Goldman refers to as “authentic reconstruction”. An example of authentic reconstruction is nostalgic memory. Through nostalgia, memory is distorted by the thick glass of time, idealized and even repainted by the whims of solitude, old age and feelings of either spatial or temporal distances.
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, 100 Years of Solitude, Pietro Crespi, a young suitor from Europe, reminisces about his far away home, while sitting on a porch in Macando with his bride to be:

‘“I have been to this park in Florence”, Pietro would say, going through the cards. “A person can put his hand out and birds will come to feed”. Sometimes, over a watercolor of Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers.”

In Pietro`s case, nostalgia not only turned the past into a foreign country, but into an invented one. This is an example of how authentic reconstruction, “far from bringing the past to bear in the present, tends to highlight the disjunction between the two.” The “going over again of past events…entailed in the production of history…establishes the horizons of the present, dividing the witnessing of events from their commemoration, perception, and recollection.” I argue that the past only becomes a foreign country by the conscious disassociation of the past from the present.

The second conceptualization of past is that of internalized memory. The notion of internalized memory argues that “remembering is not so much something that you do, as something that is implicated in all that you do…it underwrites our capacity to act effectively and with out accident in our surroundings.” In this sense, the “past has an interactive and transformative relationship to the present”, it shapes our decisions and abilities.

Memory is essential to Being. Our everyday activities and skills are mastered through apprenticeship, which corresponds to repetition and memorization. The effectiveness of “memory in the performance of [everyday] tasks is concealed behind their smooth and successful accomplishment” and “it is when things go wrong, due to an insufficiency or deterioration of know-how that our normal dependence of mnemoic processing (or memory and past experiences) becomes painfully evident.”

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Town of Macondo is stuck with a plague of insomnia, which leads to a plague of forgetfulness. When the whole town begins to loss their grip on memory and of know-how, reality also begins to slip away.

(exeprt)

This is an excellent literary metaphor illustrating the importance of memory, not only in the sense that it provides the very foundation for our knowledge and skills, but that memory also provides us with an understanding of the world in which we live. This “disease of forgetfulness” can be related to the real disease of alzheimers. It has been made clear that when our past leaves us, we are lost in the present.

Connecting past to present: Memory has an ability to. The ways in which we react to present situation are largely dictated by past experiences.

100 years of solitude starts off with a memory and only catches up with itself half way through the novel. Through out the book Marquez demonstrates his ability to bend the limits of spatial and temporal borders, moving between past, present, and future with perceptive fluidity. In 100 years of Solitude, Marquez has reconstructed the way we view past, present, and future- offering a new reworking of our conceptualization of time.