The community imperative that is Semillas

Hermanas y hermanos (nohcnihuan), thank you for your on-going support of Semillas. Recently some of our progressive allies may have questioned why Semillas would celebrate the recent victory of Monica Garcia. Nohcnihuan, don't confuse strategic choices our school community makes - in community assemblies - with political/ideological hypocrisy. Recently one of the vanguard educational leaders among Mexicanos in Southern California, Nativo Lopez, was politically, legally, and spiritually attacked by the right wing and left to his own devices by everyone else. We ought to study Nativo’s experience. Nativo was perhaps no one's poster child of educational reform in Orange County, and may have had his own contradictions like everyone else - but he worked to defend workers and community from his political position. And yet, we learn that our "Green" allies actually turned on him. According to some, “The origin of the charges against Nativo Lopez stemmed from an internal dispute within the Green Party Los Angeles County Council. Old guard conservative leadership led by Michael Feinstein lost their power sway to a reform slate, which came to prominence in the primary elections of June 2006.”

On the other hand, so-called "progressives" abandoned and colluded against him because of his "nationalism" as a Mexicano and his family was left to deal with the burden. Nativo is our friend, a champion of Semillas and will continually be esteemed among Semillas folks for his defense of our position vis-a-vis the onslaught of hate speech and government collusion to shut down Semillas in 2006. Even so, as radical as Nativo seemingly was on the Santa Ana school board in defense of Mexicano students and workers in that district, the truth is, we are dealing with a system that manipulates community-based initiatives with elasticity.  

If the accusation is that Semillas is endorsing the "Billionaire's Club educational reform for profit" so critiqued by the Los Angeles teachers' union, then there is no way the defense of Semillas can be equated to a capitulation to the privatization of public education. The minion Deasy himself has told Semillas representatives directly that Semillas "does not belong" in his District. Unfortunately for him, this is not his District, it is ours. You see, public education in the United States is corrupt, conflicted and bankrupt by DESIGN.

The only person on the LAUSD Board of Education that time and time again has stood between reactionaries getting their way, and our community's demand for dignity, was Monica Garcia against the likes of LaMotte ('the hater'), Bennet Kayser ('el perdido') and Galatzin ('the knowledge cop'). Maybe that doesn't seem significant enough to anyone else, but at Semillas, we don't forget our friends or our opponents. Now, to be clear, Semillas never endorsed any candidate, nor did our community assembly. Our parents, community and allies did however mobilize and vote. Now we plan to push for a farther-reaching, more visionary educational agenda aiming at ANY educational system Indigenous children attend anywhere in the continent. Our allies will always be welcomed, the uninformed will be educated and our opponents will be challenged. So we hope to count on allies that can see through complexities of electoral politics and so-called "American public education". We do not exist to reform "American public education". We are cultivating our own alternative. We aim for autonomy, sovereignty, and dignity in accord with the internationally recognized collective rights of Indigenous Peoples and nothing less.

After single-handledly defeating L.A. D.A. Steve Cooley's onslaught against him, Nativo issued some parting words are insightful and should help us stay true to course:                

"…What I have learned over close to half a century is that the capacity of capitalism to re-invent itself, to absorb its losses and re-adapt, but most importantly, to beguile, co-opt, and corrupt its opponents and the general citizenry, is truly astonishing. It utilizes its political parties (of differing persuasions), private foundations, tax code, public institutions, corporations of all categories, churches – traditional, new age, and evangelical, – its monopolized media, public and private education, its regulatory agencies, statutes and codes, lawyers, judges, and courts, and the public administrative bureaucracy, etc. to induce consent of the citizenry. And when consent is not secured by voluntary means, it has at its disposal the ever-ready repressive tentacles of the state apparatus to crush any and all opposition and dissent, however miniscule, to thus compel consent, and performance. Never in the history of human-kind has an imperial power of planetary dimension had available to it the reserve of monetary and human capital resources to induce consent of the governed by voluntary and involuntary means, and even extra-legal measures, as does these United States of America…"

In the wake of Nativo's absence, anti-Mexicanism in Orange County has only grown bolder.

And yet, the elasticity of the neoliberal power and its apparatuses and its minions is not eternal. Political-economic power must surrender to the forces of nature, the cosmos and life itself. Political-economic power is ethereal, temporal and finite - it is mortal, fearful and self-destructive. Our struggle for peace with justice and dignity - the Semillas imperative - is to give rise to a new generation of human beings who can see through the deception of American Democracy, organize around the complexities of capital, and regenerate a more dignified way of life. The community imperative that is Semillas, is beyond western notions of political reform, we are an initiative of Indigenous parents, educators and youth engaged in the living resilience and regeneration of millenarian ways. Power is not exclusively in the hands of human beings, we are dependent upon the relations of life we commune with and are obliged to serve them. When this is in order, peace with justice and dignity is the natural way of humanity. Nevertheless, our political resilience as Indigenous Peoples, beyond genocide, beyond colonization and certainly beyond western notions of state and democracy, will continue to flourish through community-based organizing and action, like Semillas. 

To learn more about Nativo Lopez's case: Nativo Lopez Overcomes Cooley

On anti-Mexicanism in Orange County: Anti-Mexican Orange County