Blessed rain on a tin roof in a dark room. Some voices almost faceless, yet light shines over a mountain in the distance. The visit begins like many of our visits, with an explanation of Centeotl and its mission to make villages like this one more economically viable places to live.
The conversation turns to migration, and a woman who shares my name stands up, walks to the middle of the room and speaks forcefully through tears: her husband gone to the fields of New York state where the winters are long, cold and workless; how he and his fellow workers turn to alcohol and drugs to face them. Another women with an angry voice, the husband of her daughter gone to the U.S. never to return, angry at his forgetting of home and family. So much violence – for the men forced far away from their families, forced to cross borders that employ violence as strategy, violence for the women who stay behind on land that won’t produce, raising children alone because their husbands won’t or can’t return. The soil is worn down by goats, fertilizers, deforestation. The water: not enough. It’s as if the world has no place for them – and it doesn’t really. Neoliberalism sought to rid the world of “excess” farmers, to turn them into cheap labor. They survive by diversifying, by going north, growing amaranth, tending to their milpas.
The Centeotl representative tells us “first visit: applause, second visit: *alegrias. ” Some significance there, a sharing of sustenance in return for a return, in return for a promise delivered. As we file out, we shake hands with every person, a custom so full of grace and reverence for others I wonder why we rarely stop for it in my communities. Many of the women repeat the same sentiment, “Come back, come back.” And while it’s a request, it feels like a necessity. To ask for these stories, to listen, and not seek to change the way the world makes it unfeasible to live well in one’s home seems to me a failure.
For my own well-being, I need to believe that I can plant roots in the land of my home. I need to believe that I can work with the land I live on to sustain myself. These are the things that ground me: soil, water, food. My life would be less whole were I not to have the right to grow my own food, to feel its direct connection to the place I call home. I feel compelled to fight for this right, for this community in rural Oaxaca, for communities across the world, for my family. I may never physically return to El Carmen, yet I hope I return often in my thoughts and actions, that I return by promoting the rights of individuals to live dignified, rich, and connected (to land, history and community) lives in their homelands.
I left El Carmen utterly overwhelmed. We talk of solidarity often on this program. In many ways, the visit to El Carmen began to turn my understanding of the necessity of solidarity from an intellectual one to a personal, emotional one. Still, the visit created many more questions than it answered. What does my solidarity with communities like El Carmen look like? What does it mean? How can I be in solidarity? These are questions I hope I will struggle with for the rest of my life.
*Alegrias are bars of popped and sweetened amaranth.
No comments:
Post a Comment