Democracy Ateneo Announcement 12-15-12

Compañer@s,

The ateneo scheduled for this Saturday, December 15 is significant for at least two reasons. First, it falls on the anniversary of the San Elizario Salt War of 1877, a community rebellion that led to the capture of the notorious paramilitary frontier force known as the Texas Rangers. In this particular moment of Mexicano resistance, the community managed to overcome its divisions not only to militarily defeat Texas' celebrated Rangers, but also to publicly execute a local judge, land surveyor, and merchant --all symbols of Capitalist incorporation and colonial occupation in West Texas. (for more information on the Salt War, see Callahan, "Their Heads would Have to Dance on the Sands" in Mexico Border Troubles <https://www.box.com/s/wr5njhlggxbbxy0unrvx>. For a discussion of colonial occupation, see Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics" <https://www.box.com/s/a62fda045659680a2d73>.) The brutality that followed the initial community victory by West Texas' Mexicano residents made it possible for the U.S. Federal army to conduct a formal inquiry and, therefore, facilitate the construction of an archive, both monumental and discursive, that celebrates Anglo frontier defense and expansion.

The week is also propitious since it marks a full year of ateneos convened by the Universidad de la Tierra Califas community in the Bay Area. Beginning with the Advanced Seminar in Chican@ Research and carried from Austin to Humboldt, Davis, and Santa Barbara by numerous Acción Zapatista "focos," Uni-Tierra's commitment to insurgent learning and convivial research emerges alongside longstanding Chican@ efforts to document our struggles while celebrating our genius in breaking down borders. Although the efforts to advance insurgent learning and convivial research have a long history, the work in San Jose has only just begun. Uni-Tierra's ateneo, for example, collectively generates a "living archive" of local rebellions and long-term resistances. The ateneo works in conjunction with a variety of militant research projects, or tequios de investigación, that encourage a number of strategic mobilizations such as asembleas. This network of scheduled and impromptu spaces of tertulias, talleres, and tactical cartographies, convenes an on-going insurgent space to manage our own learning at the same moment that it promotes a re-weaving of the social fabric. More recently, and most importantly, Uni-Tierra Califas has opened a new "campus" that covers no less than the statistical metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Diego. While the Salt War might be considered by many to be a clear moment of resistance to the imposition of capitalist command and concomitant racial regime, the current efforts of Uni-Tierra in San Jose and Southern Califas are no less oppositional --only without repeating Navy revolvers and Sharps rifles. What connects both episodes is the battle over knowledge production and its role in constructing community.

Uni-Tierra refuses capitalist command and disrupts racial regimes as part of a longer history of social justice struggles throughout Greater Mexico. The community that emerges from these networked spaces of rebellion rises alongside multiple efforts exploring a new democratic praxis, projects reclaiming rights and refusing second-class citizenship across Greater Mexico. These efforts toward radical democracy can be immediately observed in the battle to re-establish the celebrated Mexican American Studies program of the Tucson School District (see, <http://saveethnicstudies.org/index.shtml>) or the insurgent ambulations of the Librotraficantes <http://www.texasobserver.org/librotraficante/> across Aztlan. On the other side of the "border" a diverse mobilization of militants, students, and citizens are finding new ways to disrupt the imposition of the presidency, refusing to concede to the cynicism of Mexico's political elite despite the extreme repression intended to squash efforts to reclaim the nation (see, #YoSoy132 "Pronouncement" <http://americasmexico.blogspot.mx/search/label/%23YoSoy132>.)

These resistances against state repression and militarized policing disrupt a more complex and pervasive process of "differential inclusion" and, as our friend James Braggs with Project South <http://www.projectsouth.org/> reminds us, differential abandonment as well. In regards differential inclusion, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argue that the world that has been increasingly more open “to flows of capital and commodities” but remains constricted when it comes to the movements of different human bodies. Calling for a revised conception of the international division of labor, they introduce the category of the “multiplication of labor” which they insist escapes "the three worlds model" and binaries of center/periphery or North/south. Mezzadra and Neilson warn of the emergence of an internal border along side an increasingly militarized border insisting that capitalism’s geographic scales is not designed to prevent migrant flow but to construct a differentiated laboring subject. It functions according to Mezzadra and Neilsen, “through a continuous multiplication of control devices that correspond to a multiplication of labor regimes and the subjectivities implied by them within each single space constructed as separate within models of the international division of labor.” Thus, they propose we treat the border as method in an effort to reveal the “technologies of differential inclusion.” (Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor,” Transversal “Borders, Nations, Translations” accessed at <http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en>) Such technologies would be operational in a number of different spaces, both interior and peripheral, as in the case of the gang injunctions that are deployed in areas targeted for incorporation.

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, December 15, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose <http://www.casavicky.com/>) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space in order to generate questions in relation to the mobilizations mentioned above as well as the challenges, opportunities, and obligations of the intersections between insurgent learning, participatory democracy, and community regeneration.

South Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo announcements and summaries, they can be accessed from <https://www.box.com/s/liojs7y9zv1fsf19atq1>. For more information on the ateneo more generally, please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>.