Democracy Ateneo Announcement 11-14-15

Compañer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, November 14, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky <http://www.casavicky.com/> (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.
Over the past few weeks the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve has been the site of an evaluation of Chican@ Studies as an oppositional project working within the dominant university system. The online exchange was the result of a response to the UT Califas Democracy Ateneo announcement for October. Our dialogue began with the intervention by a comrade who shared his insights about the dangers of being too quick to dismiss the achievements of Chican@ Studies and similar projects working within major universities. Our comrade rightfully warned against being too quick to write the epitaph of Chican@ Studies as a failed project and urged the recognition of the many achievements of honest hardworking Chican@ scholar-activists committed to resistance rather than just surviving with well-funded sinecures  supported by grant foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates, that determine research, instruction, and community service agendas of universities across the country. Without rehearsing the entire exchange that took place on the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas listserve, what is at the center of our interrogation is the concern about the extent Chican@ Studies is or can be anti-capitalist. At the end of the day, it appears we agree that our work must take seriously how we advance an anti-capitalist project. However, we are not in complete agreement about what to do when we are confronted by varying degrees of complicity and capitulation in the very structures and practices of the university, an institution that is at the center of a complex antagonism of appropriation and exploitation that forges a capitalist social relation. What obligations does Chican@ Studies have to unravel the dominant social relation and help weave an alternative? If Chicanismo is a political subjectivity that refuses U.S. colonialism, does it necessarily have to claim an anti-capitalist political agenda?  If it can not take capitalism on all by itself, then what role should it play in advancing anti-capitalist struggles that are also necessarily anti-racist and anti-sexist. What would such a praxis look like within a dominant institution such as the modern Western university. If we recognize that race and gender and increasingly sexuality are essential technologies in the maintenance of inequality produced through a capitalist social relation, what role does a project like Chican@ Studies play in disrupting those technologies? And how is Chican@ Studies positioned to address the production of social relations that disproportionately reduce the life chances of the ethnic Mexican community and Latinos more generally?At the center of our query is the critical question of race and our ability to fully map the current racial regime in place that violently impacts our community. In speaking about the political challenges we face as result of the mobilizations immediately following the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, George Lipsitz asserts that "the racial order of the United States requires us to live with evil and then to lie about it, to deny even the existence of systemic and structural injustice, to identify with the oppressors and to blame the oppressed." (see, G. Lipsitz, "From Plessy to Ferguson") The racial dynamics that led to Brown's death have "a long and ignoble history" according to Lipsitz. It is within this shifting racial order that we are confronted by not only increased numbers of shooting deaths of members of our community, but also by what Lipsitz calls the "slow violence of displacement, dispossession, and disposability." As Ruth Wilson Gilmore warns, these are the numerous violences that lead to premature death. (see, R.W. Gilmore, "Race and Globalization") In this moment when racial violence is laid bare shouldn't we ask if and how ethnic studies departments are able to imagine and execute a praxis beyond solidarity?Of course, much of the interrogation of America's racial dilemma is still, for the most part, framed as black and white. We recognize the challenges Chican@ Studies departments face when confronting the racial order that makes us less visible in the fight for our rights and even more invisible when taking away our lives. Consider two recent developments that underscore the invisibility of Latinos generally and the ethnic Mexican community in particular. In the first instance we note that Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live. (see, E.J. Garcia, "Lorne Michaels You're a Genius") Republican Presidential candidate Trump has gained a great deal of notoriety for publicly and unapologetically representing Mexicano migrants as "drug dealers," "rapists", and so on. While a few have condemned his intemperate remarks, Trump has gained in the polls. At the moment, he is a contender for the highest office in the land despite having demeaned an entire community with racial epithets and unfounded characterizations. It is in the context of a presidential race that he was invited to host a major comedy show —rather than opprobrium for his racist remarks he is rewarded. And, true to form, the mainstream media along with the writers and staff at SNL co-opted the protest against Trump's appearance on the show. Larry David's shouting, "Trump's a racist," becomes a clever joke we are all supposed to be in on because we all accept that Trump is a buffoon. But, with few exceptions the negative representations of the entire ethnic Mexican community remain uncontested on several levels. On the same evening that SNL aired the Art + Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art celebrated Oscar winning filmdirector, Alejandro González Iñárritu, who, referencing Trump's speech acts, warned that "the words that have been expressed are not a joke. Words have real power; and similar words in the past have both created and triggered enormous suffering for millions of humans beings, especially throughout the last century." "If," explained González Iñárritu, "we continue to allow these words to water seeds of hate, and spread inferior thoughts and unwholesome emotions around the world to every human being, not only will millions of Mexicans and Latin American immigrants be in danger, but immigrants around the world now suffering, will share the same dangerous fate." (See, "Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘No human being is illegal’")In the second situation, the family of Anastasio Hernández-Rojas was denied justice by the U.S. Department of Justice. (See, Democracy Now, "'A Devastating Decision': No Charges for Border Guards in Beating, Taser Death of Mexican Immigrant") The decision released just days after Trump's SNL spectacle underscores the new racial regime in the U.S. On May 28, 2010 Hernández-Rojas was brutally beaten to death by over a dozen U.S. Border Patrol agents who later claimed that Hernández-Rojas was combative. Despite several eye-witnesses coming forward including with videotape of the brutal beating, the Department of Justice based its ruling on insufficient evidence to indict any of the Border Patrol agents involved in the murder of Hernández-Rojas. A father of five children born in the U.S. and a resident for over twenty-five years, Hernández-Rojas will not receive justice nor will his family. Sadly, Hernández-Rojas is not an isolated or unique case. What possibilities does a committed Chican@ Studies department offer for thinking about war as a condition of capital linked to migration and displacement? How are we positioned to respond to the violence of such projects as Fortress Europe or the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, strategies that strand bodies in oceans and deserts alike?

South Bay and North Bay Crew

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