Author: mopress

Nick Braune is a Rio Grande Valley scholar and writer who walked with Jay Johnson-Castro this past weekend. He offered the following diary which we are pleased to publish in full.–gm

One of my People for Peace and Justice friends, Juan Torres, called me from his cell phone about 10 a.m. Saturday morning saying that he was on the walk with Jay Johnson-Castro heading to the Raymondville immigrant detention center. My wife and I drove up to meet Jay, although I did not know much about what he was doing.
When I met up with him, he was making the walk to Raymondville, while three of his friends and Juan Torres were walking intermittently and driving. Somehow I had missed the news about his visit and pilgrimage; had I known, I could have organized a bit for it. I feel bad about not helping, but in my defense we had a lot of balls in the air.

The People for Peace and Justice had a showing of “Iraq for Sale” on Friday night (18 people) in San Juan, one on Saturday night (11 people) in Harlingen, and a Sunday morning event planned at one of the Unitarian Churches on the new Student Farmworker Alliance which is trying to force McDonalds to quit exploiting farm workers in Florida.

(I feel a bit defensive because Jay expressed several times on Saturday that he was annoyed that so few were walking with him to Raymondville. And he is so intense when he talks that I was sure he was calling me lazy or something. I felt a bit offended, but I’m pretty certain now that I was misinterpreting him. The walking is hard and hot.)

Saturday afternoon Jay stopped in Sebastian, a halfway point between Harlingen and Raymondville. He told us he would be finishing up the next day, and my wife, Linda, and I said we would catch up with him then near Raymondville.

At the Saturday evening showing of “Iraq for Sale,” one of the men who came down to the Valley with Jay (Kenneth Koym, a psychologist) attended and shared with our group why they were exposing the detention situation. By that time I had read the CounterPunch article by Greg Moses on Jay’s efforts and was getting into it a bit more.

One interesting connection came up at the Saurday night movie: The film we watched is about the abuses by private contractors in Iraq, and the Raymondville Detention Center is also privately owned and operated. Another connection is that Halliburton got its contracts without real bidding…as did the contractors for Raymondville. (Source: Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 8/24/06)

On Sunday after the Unitarian Church event, Linda and I drove up to see Jay again. Dr. Asma Salam from Dallas had joined the group and a lawyer from Raymondville, both of whom I got email addresses for, to quote for a weekly column I write. (Both are really committed to the fight and well informed.) Jay was feeling upbeat and made a series of beautiful stump speeches for the press — I think three news media stopped by.

One theme he makes with true eloquence is that it should not be a crime to be an economic or political refugee. Why do we treat them as criminals for being oppressed and wanting to escape to America? Isn’t that what the poem on the Statue of Liberty is about?

Of most interest for me was simply the sight of the Raymondville Center. As you drive off of the highway to it — I was in the little caravan behind Jay — you see the bleak prison buildings. Altogether it is a bigger compound than I had pictured it. (Rolling Stone did a short, but sharp, expose of it last August.) It is located at the back of an older new prison…there are four prisons in Raymondville! That is the economy.

What horrified me were the rolls of barbed wire on top of all the fences. I was not close enough to tell if it was barbed wire or razor wire, but it makes my skin crawl to see that wire anyhow, and there was a lot of it. The compound has such a violent and cruel look. It just sits there sneering violently in a dry field.

Here is the way Matt Taibbi described the detention center in Rolling Stone (8/24/06):

The prison…”looks like something that just landed from Mars — a freaky looking phalanx of gleaming white, windowless,modular tentlike domes that, much in the spirit of our cheerfully bloodsucking modern American society, simultaneously recalls Auschwitz and Space Mountain.”

The Raymondville area was called the Valley of Tears in the late 1970s during an onion strike. After the strike, the growers got rid of the workers and the Raymondville area tried textiles to survive, but NAFTA killed that. Then the idea of making Raymondville “Prisonville” caught on. Wackenhut was the first of several to set roots there. And now Raymondville with its windowless tents, is a Valley of Tears for another reason.

I applaud Jay Johnson-Castro and his friends that I met. And I will try to stay in touch.

Dear Greg,

What is your point? Should this and all nations of the world simply throw open their borders and let total chaos rule? Besides outsourcing and the idiot lifestyle acculturation of the average American today,
can’t you see that a laissez-faire immigration policy would cause the American middle class to die a quicker death than it is presently dying?
Can’t you see that multiculturalism is a failed policy encouraging only violence, hate, and social schism? Rather than promoting “diversity”, multiculturalism actually kills world wide diversity by breeding an undefined mass of anational individuals, torn from the nurturing womb of the blood and the soil that was truly theirs in their native lands. And the illusion is that they all come to
America to be “Americans”. The reality instead is that they all become hyphenated Americans. This country is already turning into a morass of hyphenations – each culture suspicious of the other and virtually
nonrecognizable vis-a-vis one another.

Through no desire of my own, I arrived in this country from Southern Europe at four years of age – the worst disaster in my life. Almost immediately, I was accosted by other established “ethnics”, blacks included and often especially, as a spic, a greenhorn, portagee. From my earliest years onward, I had little desire to become part of this supposed deracinated conglomeration of abstract Platonic entities that
supposedly bear no connection to race, nationality, language, religion, and native culture. And these same sentiments are echoed daily, yearly, and generationally by disturbed deracinated and hence emasculated youth who cry out with guns, knives, and drugs against the absurdity of this supposedly noble “social experiment”.

If you truly want to help immigrants, you don’t do it by trying to convince America’s native sons that they ought to feel pity upon the disadvantaged dregs of the earth who want to land in America and find their easy place in the sun. You do it by sending them back home, to put their houses in order, to create wealth in their own lands, and to compete effectively, on all levels, with the supposed North American masters of this world.

Regards….ABrito

********************

Dear ABrito, This morning I went to cash a paycheck. Standing in line, counting fifty people in front of me, then later fifty people behind me, I just don’t know what you mean by an easy place in the sun. Likewise I’m not following what the people around me had to do with the demise of the middle class, except that they didn’t look middle class yet, but would probably achieve it if left alone. As for multiculturalism, I beg to differ, it is one thing that redeems us. Multiculturalism reminds us that no matter how hyphenated a cultural identity may be, it belongs to a human being with human rights. Nevertheless, in consideration of the gap between our assumptions, I do appreciate thoughtful expressions of dissent, and I am happy to post your letter as food for my own thought.–gm

PS: As for the argument that people should try to live where they can solve their own problems, I think moving to the USA is for many people–such as Mexican corn farmers–exactly the place they need to be voting for more humane trade policies.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Upon the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge where the chachalacas gather in small groups to screech for dawn, John Neck takes Jay Johnson-Castro for a winding-down ride. The two friends have returned here nightly during their five-day walk against immigrant prisons, because out here where the desert plants drink freely from estuary water, life is in love with itself.
Even looking at the people out here tending to their backyard citrus groves, you can’t help but breathe a vision of life harmonious and full of grace. True, it’s a different lay of land than what the friends saw recently on the Texas Rolling Plains, but what’s the same is rural people who know the earth well enough to live off her.

As they crisscross the winding resacas of the Rio Grande Delta on their paths to and from a poisoned sampler of South Texas prisons, Laguna Atascosa always welcomes them back with a grin as if to say, wasn’t that some fukked up bullshit you saw back there, and thanks for being men enough to cry.

Not that the child prison of Los Fresnos wasn’t grim enough on Wednesday, or that the hidden secrets of Port Isabel didn’t moan underground Thursday from back behind the thicketed gates, but Sunday at Raymondville was a special spike through the heart—a concentration camp of windowless plastic hothouses where a babel of forty or more languages gets melted into one universal cry of injustice.

On a hot day you can walk into one of those steaming plastic shells and smell nothing but puke as the earth’s most fukked over stomachs do everything possible to disgorge the poisonous foods they have been conned into eating. On a cold day you can do the same thing shivering.

Once a day at Raymondville, they let the hapless masses out to remind them of sky, and then an hour later they are shoved back in. It gets to be too much. What is there for everyone to do but watch the young man who ties his bed sheet somehow to the ceiling and makes himself a noose. Everyone watches, even the guards, because there is nothing else to do. In the end, they don’t let the man finish his act, but the guards never lift a finger either way.

For a dedicated attorney such as Jodi Goodwin who walks with Jay and John this Sunday, her willingness to help overflows her ability. For one thing is the sheer number of languages that greet you. Even if you want to help that woman from Ethiopia, it would cost thousands of dollars to hire an interpreter, which is money you don’t have.

Goodwin remembers a time before blankets at Raymondville–a time before winter coats. Both of these things she demanded for her clients and got. From August through December she even demanded press coverage which is impossible to sue for these days.

Sunday Goodwin was the walk’s guest of honor. She showed up on time, got a friend to help her park her car at Raymondville, and then returned to talk and walk with Johnson-Castro as loyal cars followed slowly behind. During the final hour, the walk was joined by Dallas supporters Dr. Asma Salam and Jose Delarocha who will host prison vigils in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday. The Dallas vigils will call attention to a forthcoming federal ruling in the matter of habeas corpus for the Hazahza family who were split up between Texas prisons last November and who have yet to be reunited in freedom.

In a widening circle of conscience that began in Austin last December, the walks of Jay Johnson-Castro and John Neck have exorcised the secrets of five immigrant prisons in Texas: T. Don Hutto, Rolling Plains, International Educational Services, Port Isabel, and Raymondville. In Dallas they will try to pry another family free.

As for the thousands of nameless immigrants whose pictures we do not have, can it be true that some of them have been rotated from camp to camp for five years or more? Nothing we know tells us to disbelieve the report. The friends of Johnson-Castro have been too reliable for that. But like many Germans in 1945 there will be Americans today who can say we know something’s going on, but never exactly what.

Simply for the sake of awareness, so that the American people can know what’s going on, “we did really accomplish something here,” said Johnson-Castro to a crowd of a dozen supporters, including television crews from KGBT and Univision. “Look at all this law enforcement,” he said, indicating dozens of people in cars, plain clothes, police uniform, prison guards, and homeland security.

“The criminals who run this show can say that’s the game, but we can say we are sick and tired of you making these rules,” says Johnson-Castro from his cell phone in the thickets of Laguna Atascosa. Alas, Neck’s truck has run out of gas, so Johnson-Castro sits for a time alone in the truck while Neck takes a quarter-mile trek. The winding-down ride is over.

“The criminals make the rules,” says Johnson-Castro. “And we’re going to put a stop to that.”

We haven’t said enough good stuff about the Eye on Williamson Blog. The progressive Democrat site has editorialized in favor of closing the T. Don Hutto prison for immigrant families, most recently endorsing the conclusion reached by the editorial board at the Houston Chronicle.

BTW we have an email suggesting that there is a lingering IP issue with folks in Williamson County accessing the Texas Civil Rights Review. Our best diagnosis of the situation is that all the new development there is activating brand new IP ranges. If you know someone in this predicament, please ask them to contact me at gmosesx@prodigy.net so that we can troubleshoot.–gm