by Marcos Aguilar
November 20, 2014 has been projected to become a national day of historical paradigm shift in Mexico. From Mexico an international call to action has been sounded in defense of the 43 missing Normalistas or teaching students from the Escuela Normal Rural Burgos in #Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico. November 20, 2014 should also become a day of reckoning in the United States for its pervasive role in empowering, fueling and justifying the rule of illegitimate law in Mexico. Far from just another puppet state or banana republic, the Mexican state has become the corporate subsidiary of the American global capitalist apparatus, and it's peoples, the unwitting lumpen vassals of the free trade hydra.
Unfortunately, social struggle in the United States is virtually unknown in the popular psyche. Civil society is taught by mainstream education to believe that struggle begins and ends with the tenuous ending of slavery in the United States after the victory of the North versus the South in the American Civil War. Everything else -from actions on Wall Street and Main streets throughout this country clamoring for the ephemeral rights of the 99% to the unprecedented recent environmentalist march in New York City calling for the rights of mother Earth lead by indigenous peoples and movie stars, fits neatly in a dominant narrative without history nor continuity of social struggle. At best, social struggle is carried out through fits of populist activism punctuated and regulated by the fickle attention of mainstream media. In the U.S., you can guarantee a march will succeed if a politician or movie star show up drawing the media like bees to nectar. On-going movement, bases and centers of resistance needed to carry these out are largely ignored or unknown in the calculus of generational struggle. Instead, well meaning (and often guilt ridden) people of conscience fetishize images of social struggle as if wearing a department store print of Che Guevara somehow advanced the cause of anti-imperialism in Cuba. Alternatively, sympathy is confused for solidarity as hobbies are "dedicated" to oppressed peoples - performing yoga, jogging or sleep walking for a "cause" does little to raise consciousness in and of itself. Americans, even self-described minorities and people of color, do not generally understand the depth of commitment required to advance social struggle from generation to generation because corporate media has engaged in the depoliticization of the people for decades through mass media. Revolutionaries are labeled terrorists and conscious commitment to social struggle is labeled fanaticism. Even while truly fanatical sports "fans", self-obsessed "fitness" aficionados and religious zealots regulate their lives and livelihoods by the rituals of their fetishes and hobbies - movement organizers are constricted to social irrelevance except when movements peak.
In my own experience I've witnessed student movements propel thousands into action after years of socially isolating dedication to the cause of building the city of Los Angeles' first university Chicana and Chicano Studies Department. Over two decades later, and thirteen years into our work, we know too well the toll of building the City of Los Angeles' only community-based Indigenous Peoples educational center, our kalmekak in East Los Angeles. As people struggle now to understand the apocalyptic scale of the narco-state war in Mexico, we must first understand that no single march, protest or act of civil disobedience will turn the tide on the causes or consequences of this war. Nothing short of an economic, political and CULTURAL revolution privileging autocthonous indigenous peoples can justly calm the restless spirits of the more than 100,000 murdered women, children and men since 2006. To revolt requires more than emotions and more than prayer - and to rebuild - more than militancy. November 20, 2014 commemorates 104 years of a truncated revolution in which native peoples and ranchers, factory workers and peasants resisted the yoke of global domination and complete enslavement to the expansionist north. Today, we must build a movement of movements made up of militants committed to a generation of struggle as community. The dedicated few, however many we may be, may stand in solidarity with the cries of the 43 missing normalistas' families, and the tens of thousands of students and workers calling for justice day after restless day in Mexico now - but we do not build movement with radical emotionalism. For these 43 families, every effort must be made to pressure the narcostate to either set the 43 free or irrefutably prove the act of genocide in fact took place and exercise just punishment of those guilty of this act.
On November 21, 2014, the day AFTER the global mass mobilization, meet with your children, your neighbors' children and your grandchildren and any youth around you to call upon them to commit to one simple idea- "Never Again". Then engage in building long term centers of resistance. The Escuelas Rurales Normales are just that- centers of resistance defended for over a century as intergenerational roots of the historic Mexican revolutionary pursuit of social justice. As dozens of mass graves around Iguala, Guerrero continue to be uncovered, the movement proclaims, "Nos quisieron enterrar pero no supieron que somos semillas." In Los Ángeles and elsewhere, Semillas now asserts "Tonacayotl toquiztle ixuayo ponilizcayotl - our people are maize, when we are buried we will flower". Building a movement of movements requires flowers of resistance that spring forth year after year. Under the banner of SOMOS SEMILLAS,
We stand with the 43 normalistas and their families,
We stand with la Escuela Normal Rural Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico,
We stand with our compañeras and compañeros throughout Morelos, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Mexico where our school's direct relations live, teach and organize,
We stand with the peoples of Mexico as a plurinational nation of nations calling upon the international community to support our demands for justice, with peace and dignity.
We will continue building community and another generation of Semillas, Sembradores and Sembradoras here, in Los Angeles, as we strive to unite with movements and communities of resistance around the world.
Ce centetl ce xinaxtli, ce centetl ce tocani - Each one a seed, of each a seed planter.
On November 21, 2014, the day AFTER the global mass mobilization, meet with your children, your neighbors' children and your grandchildren and any youth around you to call upon them to commit to one simple idea- "Never Again". Then engage in building long term centers of resistance. The Escuelas Rurales Normales are just that- centers of resistance defended for over a century as intergenerational roots of the historic Mexican revolutionary pursuit of social justice. As dozens of mass graves around Iguala, Guerrero continue to be uncovered, the movement proclaims, "Nos quisieron enterrar pero no supieron que somos semillas." In Los Ángeles and elsewhere, Semillas now asserts "Tonacayotl toquiztle ixuayo ponilizcayotl - our people are maize, when we are buried we will flower". Building a movement of movements requires flowers of resistance that spring forth year after year. Under the banner of SOMOS SEMILLAS,
We stand with the 43 normalistas and their families,
We stand with la Escuela Normal Rural Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico,
We stand with our compañeras and compañeros throughout Morelos, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Mexico where our school's direct relations live, teach and organize,
We stand with the peoples of Mexico as a plurinational nation of nations calling upon the international community to support our demands for justice, with peace and dignity.
We will continue building community and another generation of Semillas, Sembradores and Sembradoras here, in Los Angeles, as we strive to unite with movements and communities of resistance around the world.
Ce centetl ce xinaxtli, ce centetl ce tocani - Each one a seed, of each a seed planter.
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