P4

Knowledge is power, my parents told me growing up.  I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise.  My parents are both educators: my father is a History professor; my mother is an English high school teacher.  My mother, whose parents are immigrants from Germany, was the first in her family to go to college, to value education.  My mother is largely the reason I have come to view education as something to love but also something that is a privilege.  Every time that I visit my German grandparents, they remind me of why it is important to arm oneself with knowledge and the power to simply think.  They themselves are immigrants, for example, and yet often align themselves with right-wing anti-immigrant fanatics.  They remind me that I never want to fall victim to the merciless manipulation of our media and the curse of growing intellectually stagnant.

I firmly believe that ignorance is dangerous; it is part of the reason we divide ourselves based on our differences, why we make unfounded assumptions, why we fear that which we do not know.  The power to think analytically is simply critical in the search and struggle for justice.  It may come as no surprise, then, that I had two simple goals for my college experience: to write and think.  No matter the particular cause I wish to promote, I know I will need to master the art of thinking critically and using words as weapons of communication.

Throughout my childhood, I remember taking an interest in creative writing.  Poems about flowers with feathers, my travels, and anecdotes about my family filled the pages of my journals.  But I do not recall feeling the power of words until I had to use them as tools and weapons.  My role at work is to motivate people to act.  Whether I am writing letters to demand payment for undocumented workers or drafting weekly emails to volunteers to commend them on their hard work or rallying supporters to participate in direct actions, I know my words have to be powerful.  Not only do they have to move people to think or act, they have to accurately communicate my own thinking; too much gets lost in translation when one’s spoken or written words are inarticulate.  Writing, I have come to understand, is a practice that will never fail to be useful.  Additionally, writing became a means to clarify my own thinking.  In high school, I engrossed myself in the art and practice of literary analysis.

But once in my university track, I realized that declaring “thinking and writing” as my major was impossible.  Like many undergraduates, for a time I was undecided.  In this particular regard of craving knowledge in diverse subjects with an overarching theme of thinking and writing critically, Plan II was a suitable major.  Though initially I had no “action plan” for my academic endeavors, I quickly realized I wanted to learn about systemic social injustices—the secrets that were omitted from my grade school textbooks.  The first semester of freshman year, I took classes that all addressed social injustices. While I have largely focused my studies on Latin America and L.A. immigrants in the U.S, I cannot help but connect this struggle to similar narratives of racial oppression.  Last semester, I studied the African Diaspora because I wanted to understand the history of the institutionalized dehumanization of a segment of the human race. The story of the forced dispersal of African people across the globe for the capitalist purpose of exploiting their manpower for economic advancement has left me with an insatiable hunger to know more about human rights abuses across all cultures.  Generally speaking, I demand one thing of every class: answers to questions my society has buried, left unanswered, but which are present every day.  I want to know why the origins of our Christian culture are laced with male privilege, the objectification of women, racism, and even speciesism.  Specifically, I would like to take courses in Surveillance and Social Control, community organizing, historical social movements, and radical women in Latin America and Russia. 

As a longer-term goal, I plan on traveling and studying abroad.  Last semester I was irrevocably set on studying in Mexico, Nicaragua, or Guatemala.  This semester, I have added St. Petersburg, Russia.  Having studied the history of anarchy, nihilism, and in general, revolution in Russia, I have decided I want to study abroad there too.  As a concrete goal, I plan to study abroad with the Moscow Plus program next summer.  For the following spring, I plan to study abroad in Mexico City or Puelba—application deadline is October 1, 2011. 

While the classes I most want to take involve issues of social and economic justice, I have grown to crave studies in environmental justice and animal rights advocacy.  Over the last few months, I have irrevocably committed myself to the idea that everything is connected.  How can I limit my activism to workers rights if their liberation and rights are connected with the land they inhabit?  Whether I have to study philosophy or art to better understand social injustices is irrelevant, because my objective is always to arm myself with knowledge that will be useful in the struggle against corporate interest that harm the earth and the majority of its inhabitants.

But now, I want to dream.  I can study how profound the roots of injustice stretch, but this is only the first step.  During an Activism vs. Community Organizing training at work, my coworker asked me to draw my vision of a just world.  I stared at a blank sheet of copy paper for a while, imagining all the pictures I could be drawing.  I thought about drawing a balance to show how one human being is of equal value to another.  I could have drawn people’s hands, brains, and bodies, as equal to show that the diverse means of work should be equally legitimated.  Or of course, the cliché of people of different colored skins, of different body types, of different cultures, of different origins, holding hands around the globe and singing kum-ba-ya.  But instead, I drew six nuclei of communities, like round scars on the earth.  From the epicenter of each point, I drew shockwaves radiating outwards until the paper was covered in different colored concentric and overlapping circles. Each shockwave represented a sphere of power.  At the points of intersection, where one color circle met another, I drew red exes haloed with yellow streaks and wrote the word “lucha” (Spanish for struggle).  The white page was alive with red exes, of communities meeting halfway to struggle together.  But abruptly, I descended from my dream to the sound of coworkers describing their visionary renditions.  I noticed that in comparison, I had failed to dream up the end result, the goal, of coming together to struggle.  Struggle for what, they asked me.  I said something like, “freedom from social injustice.”

My dream for myself is this.  But my dream for the movement for social justice, that has become a part of who I am, has many tiers.  On a symptomatic level, I want to see a change in Austin.  On June 11, 2009, three white hard hats hung from homemade wooden crosses at 21st and Rio Grande in Austin, TX.  The light from red and white votive candles casted shadows of crucifixes all along the length of the 21Rio luxury condos.  Blood red poinsettias filled the construction boots right below them, as though the ghosts of the deceased workers were still wearing their work uniform.  A young girl sat in front of the altar mesmerized by the candlelight; she carried a sign that read: My daddy is a construction worker.  Please do not let him die.  The visual was powerful; the grief was palpable.  

I was in charge of the logistics of the vigil.  I was supposed to be composed, hand out flyers, coordinate the press, etc.-not philosophize or feel.  But for moments, I would go absolutely numb with sorrow: my eyes tear-stained; my ears filled with prayer songs in Spanish.  It is one thing to read about the tragedy in the Austin American Statesman the next day, or in a class; it is quite another to be there and experience the loss.  Three immigrant construction workers fell to their deaths due to negligently assembled scaffolding.  Necessary safety precautions were not taken because their young lives were deemed as disposable as the rubble from the demolition.  Their deaths could have been prevented.  And in this moment, nothing could remedy the intoxication of outrage, of injustice, of grief that consumed me.

Nothing, except a burning motivation to remedy and rectify these injustices.  I want to continue learning how to combat discrimination, xenophobia, and a blatant disregard for immigrant/worker’s rights on a case-by-case basis.  Of course, the process is gradual, but the knowledge I have gained through our popular education model at work and my academic studies has helped me better serve immigrant workers. Fighting against exploitation and racism is no tea party, nor is it driven by sheer activism.  I have found that it takes late night meetings, hours of door-to-door outreach, photocopying flyers, making phone calls, and filing cases.  I often spend my afternoons trying to convince employers from high-ranking construction companies that they have a legal and moral obligation to pay the human beings who provided them services, sweat, and in the case of injured or deceased workers, blood.  To pay the people who helped restore the Austin Capitol building, who cut the grass of the governor's mansion, or who installed tile at the Barton Creek Country Club.  Perhaps this may seem absurd that such sites were built on stolen labor, but so goes our current and historical U.S. narrative.

I do not desire to have a conventional career; perhaps I chose Plan II as my major so I would not have to.  And while I do not know what I want to do in four years, let alone next semester, I know that I want to continue learning about social injustices.  Perhaps I could become a human rights lawyer, or a grant-writer for a non-profit organization, or simply use my academic training to be a community organizer.  I cannot say that I have enlisted to become a Zapatista to live in the mountains, give up my power and privilege, be a true revolutionary.  But I made an abiding commitment to do what is easily within my power: to learn, to protest, to organize, to change. 

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