The Bleeding Wound of the Borderlands

June 11, 2006<

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming we come to you this morning with many things on our minds. All of us here have had a week in which we have been presented with problems that need solving.

Help us to remember that life is not a sit-com that can be digested and solved in 26 minutes. Help us Great Spirit to realize that sometimes our life’s work is but the beginning, middle or end of a problem that has been going on for 1000’s of years.

In this vain give us the strength, help us to know that we have within us the strength, to do whatever it is that needs to be done regardless of the immediate outcome. And remind each and everyone of us that there are wild cards in life, things that we would never have guessed in a million years that can, do and will affect the outcome.

Let our thinking be such that our minds are not closed around what we see to be the solution, that our vision can encompass ideas, thoughts, and solutions that may at first seem foreign and not to our liking.

Finally give us all the strength to face the impossible as simply an idea that keeps most of us from trying. For everything that we do, every idea, every lesson, every child of ours, and even ourselves, we all face death on a daily basis. Let this not be a source of futility, but rather a source of the greatest joy as we realize that what we do we do in spite of this, perhaps in the very face of death we find a meaning that transcends both life and death.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Readings:

What is born will die.

What has been gathered will be dispersed,

What has been accumulated will be exhausted,

What has been built up will collapse,

And what has been high will be brought low.

(Traditional Buddhist Scripture)

God’s Dog – conversations with Coyote,

Webster Kitchell

“Nothing personal,” said Coyote, but I really don’t like your kind. I think First Woman made a mistake when she created you as a species. You humans are coming to be a real curse on the planet. Nothing personal. Some of you I like individually. I find you entertaining in a coyote sort of way. But by and large you live in a weird world in your heads. You live in a complicated set of lies, both personal and social, which you believe even when they don’t obviously work. I think you humans are a threat to us all.”

SERMON: The Bleeding Wound of the Borderlands

I wish I could say that this was going to uplifting. It’s a tragedy with no heroes or heroines. It’s a farce with the government wielding sledgehammers instead of rubber ones. It’s a love story of a people who will not be dominated by those who have the money. It’s a who-done-it with the surprise ending that we’ve all been at the scene of the crime, and we earned ourselves a spectators badge without even knowing it. It’s an essay on how democracy was hijacked by guys wearing Dockers who are married to soccer moms. It’s a lament that sings of lose and more lose. It’s a prairie coyote howling at the moon, sending its prayers for food and water to the great creator. And finally it’s the blues, can’t get none, ain’t none in sight, and it’s looks like a whole bunch-a-none is in our future.

I have been to the borderlands 4 times now in the past few years and every time I wonder why I go? Why do I seem willing to witness what I witness there? What is it about these hopeless and god-forsaken people that draw me to them, that find in them a source of both strength and harmony? How could I have imagined that a contract worker working for $75 a week with a wife, two daughters and a son would speak like a President and the man so elected would conduct himself as if he were the one deprived – deprived of good sense, deprived of the simple ability to speak the King’s English, deprived of his compassion – yet, this is the story of the borderlands. All Presidents of the United States have acted thusly toward her and she is really tired of it.

So I come to witness and see with my own eyes the very thing that scares me – poverty. The very word evokes a desert land of just about everything that concerns having nothing.

There is another caveat in this sermon. If you’ve got a good financial portfolio there a pretty substantial chance that you’re complicitous in the poverty that goes to make up the Borderlands. But don’t worry, too much, in a greater or lesser sense we are all complicitous. Ralph Waldo Emerson made the comment before the Civil War that those who had financial interests in the South and could not speak out against slavery had altered the Unitarian belief in the perfectibility of man. Emerson said that these invested Unitarians were less interested in the perfectibility of man and more interested in the perfectibility of their own pocketbooks. There is a sense in which this paradigm still exists today.

To understand the borderlands – to understand anything that is going on in Mexico we must take a look at the past.

The first question that we have to ask ourselves is why would a country that had an honest to goodness proletarian revolution at the beginning of the 20th Century have labor problems at the beginning of the 21st Century? They really had one of those “workers of the world unite? sort of thing so how could it have failed to secure the rights of the workers?

The Mexican Revolution started in 1910 when the dictator Porfirio Diaz was divested of his power. The revolution lasted seven years and culminated in a signing of a new Mexican constitution in 1917. Their proletarian revolution happened before the Russians. Mexico had two popular revolutionary leaders – Poncho Villa in the north and Emilio Zapata in the south. When Diaz was forced to hold elections the man who had led strikes against his dictatorship, Francisco Madero, was elected President, but neither Zapata in the south, or Villa in the north supported Madero.

Zapata and his farmer armies weren’t willing to wait for land reform and there was essentially a civil war between opposing rebel forces and one million Mexicans – ten percent of the population of Mexico at that time were killed. Zapata declared himself President in 1911 and his armies chased landowners off their property in the south. Under the guise of coming to the aid of a US sailor the United States? Army invaded Vera Cruz in 1914 and stayed there for seven months.

Villa kept crossing the US Mexican border and in 1916 General Pershing was sent into Mexico after him. A seventy-year-old Ambrose Bierce disappeared into this part of the revolution and was never heard from again, but was later lionized by Gregory Peck in the movie, Old Gringo.

Madero, the president that no one supported, was assassinated in a coup led by General Huerto. The majority of revolutionaries revolted against the government set up by General Huerto and the governor of the state of Coahila, Venustiano Carranza formed a constitutional army and instituted the majority of the rebels? social demands in a new constitution that was approved in 1917.

Then, one by one the revolutionary leaders were done away with – Carranza had Zapata ambushed, but then when Carranza was running for election as President a General Obregon felt sure he was going to be defeated by Carranza so he had Carranza killed to make sure that didn’t happen.

General Obregon turned out to be a terrific organizer and he founded the Partido Naccionalista Mexicano (the PNM), which then ruled for seventy years until Vicente Fox was elected President in the 1990’s.

As one researcher put it, “The Revolution did, eventually, lead to social and political change of significance, but one could argue that very little of the ultimate outcome was envisaged or planned by any of the revolutionary factions. Ultimately, what made the Mexican Revolution revolutionary was the way change was canalized by popular struggles. The final outcome was, one could argue, in many respects a continuation of the project of the pre-revolutionary regime of Porfirio Diaz – that is, a project to develop and modernize the country through the action of a centralized state.” The more things change the more they stay the same. To quote another researcher “post-revolutionary class structure was relatively unchanged in spite of widespread mobilization and revolution.”

Historically we’re up to date. During the seventy years that the PNM ruled the country the Maquiladora system started up. Basically Maquiladoras are assembly plants. Jobs that used to be done in the US and other countries get outsourced to Mexico. Why? Well, all you have to do is google Maquiladora and the first thing that will come up on your screen will be an ad that will guarantee you a savings of 75% on labor costs when you move your job site south of the US/Mexican border.

The first Maquiladora that appeared did so in 1965. That date just happens to coincide to the height of the labor movement in the United States. This is no coincidence.

The chief reason things have gotten worse south of the border is the North American Free Trade Agreement. This one lands right in the lap of the democrats and President Clinton. As the bumper sticker says Clinton lied and no one died, but the bumper sticker you won’t see is Clinton agreed and the wage-slaves were not freed.

On Friday two weeks ago I traveled with the American Friends Service Committee to Mexico – an organization sponsored by the Quakers. Four times a year delegates from the AFSC travel to the borderlands. These delegations are made up of anyone who wishes to go. Events are planned for the trip, but the main event is the first hand witnessing of what is taking place on the border.

The town of Piedras Negras is actually a very clean and tidy border town. I was impressed by the lack of trash and the quaint square in the middle of town with the pick stucco Catholic Church right off the square.

On the first evening, Friday night, we had dinner at the home of Juan Hernandez (I’ve changed all the names in this because workers have had reprisals brought against them when articles appear in newspapers, magazines or on-line). Juan, his wife, two daughters and a son live in a concrete block building that can be no more than 400 square feet. I believe Juan’s brother lives there, also. Juan’s wife fixed us Gordidas for dinner. We ate outside in the cooling twilight.

After dinner Juan told us that in 1999 – before NAFTA he made from 140-160 dollars a week. Now he makes – doing exactly the same job – 40-60 dollars a week. The management of the Maquiladoras used to give the workers six month to a year contracts now they give them 20-30 day contracts.

What impressed me most about Juan was his ability to articulate his problems. He said what disturbed him the most is that we were leaving a horrible legacy of bad environment and evil labor practices for our children and their children. Juan works for the CFO – the Comite Fronterizo de Obreras.

The CFO is a union that is independent from the Mexican state. During the industrialization of Mexico the leaders of the country thought it best if Unions were state run. Unfortunately, this means that the unions are not on the side of the workers, but on the side of the manufacturers and managers!

The main purpose of the CFO – the union that is organized by and for the workers – is to help the workers understand the bible of Mexican labor. This bible is a thick red book, which contains all the labor laws enacted in Mexico. Mexico actually has good labor laws, but the workers are rarely informed of their rights. Good labor laws without informed workers are meaningless.

The next day, Saturday we traveled the 84 kilometers from Piedras Negras to Cuidad Acuna. There we met with Teresa Isabella Rodriquez, a CFO organizer. She helps organize workers in the neighborhoods by helping them understand their rights under Mexican labor laws.

In the afternoon we had lunch at the offices of the CFO and met with workers from various Maquiladoras. What we learned there was astonishing. The managers of the Maquiladoras are in charge of all monies that are paid workers. So – if there is a worker who has worked in a Maquiladora for many years there is a substantial amount of money owned that worker when they are divested of their jobs. Say when the plant moves somewhere else! The managers have taken it upon themselves to see that those workers are not paid their proper monies.

One worker we met was locked in a room 2 feet by 3 feet, given water and let out to the bathroom twice a day. He is being paid, but is not allowed to work. The hope is that he will become disgusted with the treatment and quit. If a worker quits his or her job they are not entitled to get their severance monies.

Another gentleman who had worked for Delphi – a subsidiary of General Motors – for seven years was put back in the beginning class where he was originally taught how to sew seat covers. There he was told to sew, and then unsew the same seat cover all day long. He was permitted to work, but the hope is that he, too, will quit in disgust.

A gentleman known as Don Giovanni said that these tactics are worthy of the descendants of Hitler. Sighting examples of how holocaust prisoners were made to carry rocks from one pile to another, and then carry the same rocks back to the original pile, this man condemned such behavior as fascistic and torturous.

I’m thinking now of Maria Reina Sanchez. I met her on a trip to the borderlands in February of 2005. For three years, six days a week for 45 hours a week, she dipped her unprotected, naked hand in Toluene. Why? Simply to wipe the fingerprints off the instrument panels of General Motors cars. On her face she wore a paper mask – the kind you might wear if you had allergies and were mowing your grass. Toluene is a hydrocarbon of the aromatic series, obtained chiefly from coke-oven vapors and the distillation of coal tar and it is highly carcinogenic.

Not surprisingly Maria Sanchez got cancer from the prolonged exposure to the toluene. She was undergoing radiation and chemotherapy when Delphi – a subsidiary of GM – fired her for missing work. They fired her without paying her severance pay. She sued and won. She won a whopping $10,000! – enough to keep her family afloat for two years. But she is still dying of her cancers.

The vision I have of Maria Sanchez wiping fingerprints off GM instrument panels is like the scene of a crime. Criminals want their fingerprints removed so that they may avoid prosecution for their crimes. In like manner, General Motors, General Electric, Johnson Controls, Kohler, Emerson Electronic, Erika, Tenneco, Maytag, Panasonic, Black and Decker, Goodwrench Auto Body Centers and other foreign and US companies want their fingerprints removed from what’s happening to the workers just south of our borders.

Conclusion:

In the movie The Barbarian Invasion the main character, a patient in a hospital, is speaking to a Nun who works for the hospital.

“Contrary to belief, the 20th century wasn’t that bloody. It’s agreed that wars caused 100 million deaths. Add 16 million deaths for the Russian gulags. The Chinese camps we’ll never know, but say 20 million. So, 130-135 million dead. Not all that impressive. IN the 16th century the Spanish & Portuguese managed, without gas chambers and bombs, to laughter 150 million Indians in Latin America. With axes! That’s a lot of work, Sister. Even if they had church support, it was an achievement. So much so that the Dutch, English, French and later Americans followed their lead and butchered another 50 million. 200 million dead in all! The greatest massacre in history took place right here in the Americas. And not the tiniest holocaust museum.”

I have a theory why there’s no holocaust museum in the Americas for 200 million dead indigenous peoples – we aren’t through yet. The slaughter continues, but this time in a more civilized manner. We’re letting the greedy corporations of the world do all our killing for us – unless of course, time is of the essence, time is money you know. If time is of the essence, then we’ll send the troops in first to clear the way – to kill the way so that the corporations can follow.

I’ve told you some of the ways the corporations kill – they pass off their workload to the Kapos – those inmates within Nazi concentration camps who were Jews, but turned against their own kind. True, the Mexican managers of the Maquiladoras may not be literally killing their own kind, but they are torturing them with meaningless work, and playing power and mind games with people whose only concern is to put food on their tables.

And for those of you who are not buying the idea that corporations are bad, here’s what Jerry Mander in his book, In Absence of the Sacred, has to say: “Now that we see the inherent direction of corporate activity, we must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves, or that a new generation of executive managers can be re-educated. We must also abandon the assumption that the form of the structure is “neutral.” To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are not subject to moral behavior. They are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism.”

There are two lights at the end of this tunnel. The first light is a wildcard known as the Peak Oil theory put forth by people like M. King Hubbard and M. Heinberg. This theory states that oil production can be documented in a bell curve. There is the period when the well is first tapped and production soars. This is the upward movement of the bell curve. Then the production evens off and we have the top or peak of the bell. According to the Peak Oil theory when gasoline and diesel goes over $5 a gallon, then it will be too expensive to outsource jobs across borders – be it Mexico, South Korea, or China. The monies saved in labor costs will more than be made up for in transportation costs. Perhaps at that time the jobs that have been outsourced will come back into this country, perhaps not, but it looks as if the days of the unfair practices in the Maquiladoras, and perhaps the Maquiladoras themselves, are numbered. Yet, how many will be exploited and die in the meantime?

The other hope is that there are worker owned Maquiladoras in Mexico. We visited one in Piedras Negras – owned and operated by members of the CFO. It is the Maquiladora of Justice and Dignity. This Maquiladora assembles organic cotton material into t-shirts and shopping bags. They started with two sewing machines that were for home use, and then bought industrial sewing machines. They work in a space that is neither air-conditioned nor heated. There are a total of 5 workers – all women – who work there.

If you’re feeling hopeless and helpless then support this worker owned Maquiladora so they can air condition and heat their workspace. If this church feels like doing that I’d be glad to help the social action committee coordinate that funding.

There’s something else we can all do. Stop buying retail. Put your money underground. Barter with your friends. Start buying second hand. Go to garage sales. Buy used appliances – your clothes will get just as clean. A used hammer drives a nail just fine. Yes, there is the argument that if we all stopped buying retail the economy in Mexico and this country would go south, that the workers who now have poorly paying jobs would have no jobs at all. All I can say to that is the same argument was made before the Civil War – what would all those slaves do if there were no slavery. In my opinion that objection begs the question. It’s cruel. It’s meaningless.

The important thing is to be informed that such things are happening less than five hours from Austin. And after being informed it is important to act. Investigate companies that you do business with – don’t take a corporations word for anything. Corporations will always tell you the upside and never tell you the down side. They are fictitious persons who act amorally and in the end the only things that count are growth and money.

Here are other things you can do. Join a delegation from the American Friend Service Committee, go to the borderlands and become a witness for humanity. Write your Texas Senators and Congressional Representatives and suggest that there are better ways to treat people and that saving money at Wal-Mart shouldn’t include wage slavery on either side of the border.

In closing I’d like to remind you of that wonderfully terrible analogy of the world being represented at one long table. At one end of the table are the starving children of the world – hundreds of thousand dying daily. In front of them there is no food. At the other end of the table is where we sit with all the food, our obese children, and our culture of television and escapism. Who among us could sit at such a table and eat with impunity? I dare say not a one.