Politics of a New Generation: The Student Strike at the University of Puerto Rico

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Eliacin

Via The Huffington Post

Beyond Protests: Students Making the Pieces of a Different Society

Students in Iran, in Greece, in Puerto Rico — all have shown a noticeable endurance to fight on for weeks against governments which are threatening their basic rights. Even more important, in this struggle they are not only protesting but developing the elements for alternative politics and social settings. The Puerto Rican students who have occupied the campus of the Unviersidad de Puerto Rico for weeks, surrounded by armed forces, are doing urban agriculture, collective cooking, environmentally sustainable practices, art, music… in brief, they are striving to build the elements of a different society.

Here below is the account of one of the professors who has joined the students in the strike.

Politics of a New Generation: The Student Strike at the University of Puerto Rico
Mareia Quintero-Rivera

They wake up early for a long and unpredictable day: practice yoga, separate garbage for recycling, and turn on their own radio station Radio Huelga “to get in tune with resistance,” as the slogan goes. Ten out of eleven campuses of the University of Puerto Rico, which encompasses 65,000 students, are on strike. Their fight is not new: the vindication of public education. But their modes of struggle speak of untraditional ways of thinking and making politics.

In the midst of a profound economic crisis, and facing a government that is enforcing an aggressive program to shrink the public sector, students have taken a stand for a social dialogue. They demand participation and transparency in the decisions concerning how to deal with budget cuts. The University of Puerto Rico confronts a deficit of nearly $170 million for the next academic year 2010-2011, due to a reduction on the base of State’s incomes from which the allocation of its funds is determined. This is a consequence of a special law that declared a state of fiscal emergency on the island (Law 7), approved in March 2009.
Moving away from the violent images of the first morning at the Río Piedras Campus’ gates, which were quickly disseminated and repeated by the media, the student movement has succeeded in gaining respect and admiration for their organized and creative means of leading the strike. They have been consistent in their call for a politics of dialogue and mediation. Time has been one of their allies. Living on Campus together, for more than three weeks now, has allowed them a space to put into practice and strengthen new ways of understanding and undertaking political action.

Organized in committees, they have been emphatic in using participatory and horizontal processes of decision-making. They speak through different voices, and have displayed an extraordinary command of diverse registers of discourse: from assuming with success their own defense in the courts (where the administration tried to displace the conflict), to developing an alternative network of communications (blogs, radio stations, youtube channels), and a wide range of artistic interventions. This plurality of actors and actions has overshadowed traditional political organizations, with their confrontational styles and rhetoric.
The student movement has shown a deep understanding of the challenges faced by public education in our days. But their commitment goes beyond a restricted catalogue of demands, or the defense of a fixed ideal. Their struggle arises as an ongoing search for a different order of things. As they declared on the first emission of Radio Huelga after ten days of strike: “We are not the same. This process is part of our aims. We are being transformed day by day, and we have started seeing things in another way. This strike contains the desire of another world, which is possible if we construct it in the process. Making it from within.” While developing strategies to enable a negotiation with the administration, an active calendar of academic and cultural activities has been organized with the support and solidarity of professors, artists, farmers, and many others. This includes: daily lectures on a wide variety of topics, poetry readings, film screenings, traditional bomba dance workshops, and even a communal garden with lettuce, tomatoes, plantains, basil, and other crops which they plan to maintain after the strike is over. Five major concerts have taken placed at the campuses of Río Piedras, Humacao, Cayey, Arecibo, and Mayagüez, with the participation of some of the most recognized Puerto Rican musicians of different styles and generations. They celebrated Mother’s Day cooking together and inviting their families to the University’s gateways.

In the academic community, and in the Puerto Rican society in general, there is a growing consensus that the crisis cannot be faced blindly following what the “committees of fiscal efficiency” decide, as the University’s administration and the Government have tried to make us believe. The student movement has vindicated the University as a place for critical thinking, for an informed debate of ideas, for the development of alternatives, and for democratic participation. They have done it with contagious enthusiasm, firmly but beautifully, throwing flowers to the policemen who surround campus.

After a massive ratification of the strike by a student’s general assembly held last Thursday, May 13th, the administration has responded with the astonishing decision of closing the Río Piedras Campus until July 31, and calling on the Police to surround and take control of the University grounds. The closure of our institution is a devastating act that compromises too many substantial elements of academic life. It means the paralysis of important scientific research done at the campus laboratories- which researchers have been able to maintain during the strike-, the silencing of the University’s radio station, the risk of loosing the semester and punishing mainly those who are candidates for a degree, the cancelling of the summer session, the ceasing of legal, psychological, social work, and other clinics that provide services to the community, the uncertainty of hundreds of professors that work for hire and whose contracts end this month, the interruption of international agreements and collaborative efforts, the suspension of funding proposals for research, among others. Most important, it conveys the message that there is no place for a social dialogue, and that dissidence will be ignored.

Professor at Columbia University. www.saskiasassen.com. Twitter @SaskiaSassen
Author of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008).

Remembering Dom Hélder Camara

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Eliacin

“I love hearing the apostles ask: ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’ we may sometimes think we’ve learnt how to pray already. All the same, knowing the Lord’s Prayer off by heart isn’t enough. The important thing is to learn to live the prayer the Lord has taught us.

“Beginning with ‘Our Father.’ Are we really convinced that God is the Father of us all? Not merely ‘my’ Father, but ‘our’ Father. If he is ‘ours’, then we are all brother and sisters. People with the same father are brothers and sisters.

“It is very easy at mass to say, ‘Peace be with you’ to the person standing next to you; but after that we each go home and the other person is forgotten. If the other people were really our brothers and sisters and we knew they were ill, in misery, perhaps even dying of hunger, we would do all we possibly could for them, and more…

“Then again, when we say, ‘Thy will be done.’ It’s easy enough to accept God’s will when it coincides with our own. We know exactly how to ask the Lord for things, but the Lord had better look out and agree with what we want. And on no account should the Lord think or want anything different.

“And yet, very often, what we ask for isn’t what is good for us. We are like little children, as far as the Lord is concerned. A father knows better than to give his child the knife it wants to play with, or to let it go down the stairs on its own.

“You know the prayer I love to say? ‘Lord, may your grace help me to want what you want, to prefer what you prefer…’ Want what you want… Prefer what you prefer… For, honestly, what do we know? We ought to do everything as though all depended on us, at the same time putting ourselves into the Lord’s hands, knowing that our own strength lies in offering him our weaknesses.
“We really need to learn to live Christ’s prayer…..”

Dom Hélder Camara, Archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Brazil, died on August 27, 1999, at 90 years of age. The twelfth of 13 children, son of a bookkeeper and a grade school teacher, he became one of the most loved and, at the same time, most opposed persons of Brazil in this century. With his death, his image gains new stature.

Dom Helder, as he was known, was internationally acknowledged as “a man of God and a defender of the poor.” In the 60’s and the 70’s, he was with Pele, the soccer player, the Brazilian most known throughout the world.

That small frail man, to whom it applied the sobriquet of “the red bishop,” was a source of embarrassment for the military regime. Under the pretext of national and personal security, Dom Helder was for many years subjected to endless interrogations and threats. The personal protection he refused saying, “I don’t need you gentlemen, I have my own security guards. They are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” As to his supposed threat to the national security, endlessly he would declare that he was no communist, no Marxist, and no subversive. “I feed the poor, I’m called a saint. I ask why the poor have no food, I’m called a communist.”
He raised his voice when many held their silence. So he was silenced. From 1970 and for 13 years hence, in a miserly attitude which is habitual to dictators, the government banned him from any public spaking and forbade even the publication of his name in any media. Exiled in his own country.

Read more…

Todos somos Gaza

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Eliacin

A message from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, read by Subcomandate Marcos. Sound in Spanish. Text in English below.

Two days ago, the same day we discussed violence, the ineffable Condoleezza Rice, a US official, declared that what was happening in Gaza was the Palestinians’ fault, due to their violent nature.

The underground rivers that crisscross the world can change their geography, but they sing the same song.

And the one we hear now is one of war and pain.

Not far from here, in a place called Gaza, in Palestine, in the Middle East, right here next to us, the Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.

The steps it has taken are those of a classic military war of conquest: first an intense mass bombing in order to destroy “strategic” military points (that’s how the military manuals put it) and to “soften” the resistance’s reinforcements; next a fierce control over information: everything that is heard and seen “in the outside world,” that is, outside the theater of operations, must be selected with military criteria; now intense artillery fire against the enemy infantry to protect the advance of troop to new positions; then there will be a siege to weaken the enemy garrison; then the assault that conquers the position and annihilates the enemy, then the “cleaning out” of the probable “nests of resistance.”

The military manual of modern war, with a few variations and additions, is being followed step-by-step by the invading military forces.

We don’t know a lot about this, and there are surely specialists in the so-called “conflict in the Middle East,” but from this corner we have something to say:

According to the news photos, the “strategic” points destroyed by the Israeli government’s air force are houses, shacks, civilian buildings. We haven’t seen a single bunker, nor a barracks, nor a military airport, nor cannons, amongst the rubble. So–and please excuse our ignorance–we think that either the planes’ guns have bad aim, or in Gaza such “strategic” military points don’t exist.

We have never had the honor of visiting Palestine, but we suppose that people, men, women, children, and the elderly–not soldiers–lived in those houses, shacks, and buildings.

We also haven’t seen the resistance’s reinforcements, just rubble.

We have seen, however, the futile efforts of the information siege, and the world governments trying to decide between ignoring or applauding the invasion, and the UN, which has been useless for quite some time, sending out tepid press releases.

But wait. It just occurred to us that perhaps to the Israeli government those men, women, children, and elderly people are enemy soldiers, and as such, the shacks, houses, and buildings that they inhabited are barracks that need to be destroyed.

So surely the hail of bullets that fell on Gaza this morning were in order to protect the Israeli infantry’s advance from those men, women, children, and elderly people.

And the enemy garrison that they want to weaken with the siege that is spread out all over Gaza is the Palestinian population that lives there. And the assault will seek to annihilate that population. And whichever man, woman, child, or elderly person that manages to escape or hide from the predictably bloody assault will later be “hunted” so that the cleansing is complete and the commanders in charge of the operation can report to their superiors: “We’ve completed the mission.”

Again, pardon our ignorance, maybe what we’re saying is beside the point. And instead of condemning the ongoing crime, being the indigenous and warriors that we are, we should be discussing and taking a position in the discussion about if it’s “zionism” or “antisemitism,” or if Hamas’ bombs started it.

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we’re lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there’s a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Who from below and to the left can remain silent?

Is it useful to say something? Do our cries stop even one bomb? Does our word save the life of even one Palestinian?

We think that yes, it is useful. Maybe we don’t stop a bomb and our word won’t turn into an armored shield so that that 5.56 mm or 9 mm caliber bullet with the letters “IMI” or “Israeli Military Industry” etched into the base of the cartridge won’t hit the chest of a girl or boy, but perhaps our word can manage to join forces with others in Mexico and the world and perhaps first it’s heard as a murmur, then out loud, and then a scream that they hear in Gaza.

We don’t know about you, but we Zapatistas from the EZLN, we know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar might not stop a bomb, but it’s as if a crack were opened in the black room of death and a tiny ray of light slips in.

As for everything else, what will happen will happen. The Israeli government will declare that it dealt a severe blow to terrorism, it will hide the magnitude of the massacre from its people, the large weapons manufacturers will have obtained economic support to face the crisis, and “the global public opinion,” that malleable entity that is always in fashion, will turn away.

But that’s not all. The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.

And perhaps a boy or girl from Gaza will survive, too. Perhaps they’ll grow, and with them, their nerve, indignation, and rage. Perhaps they’ll become soldiers or militiamen for one of the groups that struggle in Palestine. Perhaps they’ll find themselves in combat with Israel. Perhaps they’ll do it firing a gun. Perhaps sacrificing themselves with a belt of dynamite around their waists.

And then, from up there above, they will write about the Palestinians’ violent nature and they’ll make declarations condemning that violence and they’ll get back to discussing if it’s zionism or anti-semitism.

And no one will ask who planted that which is being harvested.

For the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army,

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, January 4, 2009.