Author: mopress

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro

Hola y’all…

I have enjoyed a wonderful relationship with the media. Printed, radio and television. It is only through the media that we grass roots folks can get our voices heard. The border wall. Hutto. Raymondville. Haskell. Whether local, state, national or international…mainstream or indy media and blogsphere…it is the media that allows us to connect with fellow Americans and therefore make a difference in our country and the world around us.

I am quite proud to announce a great privilege bestowed upon me by one of my favorite media sources…the publishers and editors of the Rio Grande Guardian. Although I will continue my quest in human rights activism…and work closely with all of our media friends…I have been invited to be a weekly columnist.

Steve Taylor has long been considered the one of the premiere journalists on the Rio Grande. His internet news network, the Rio Grande Guardian (RGG) has been the go to place for lobbyists, politicians (local, state and national), other media sources as well as the commercial and business community. http://www.riograndeguardian.com has been a subscription source up until today.

Well…today, July 7th, is the anniversary of the Rio Grande Guardian. And officially as of today…it has a new look and a new feel…and…it is free!

Back in October…it was a phone call from Steve that sealed the reality of the first Border Wall-K…which opened a whole new chapter in my life. When Steve broke the story of the Border Wall-K…my life would change forever.

Steve also broke the story on my first Hutto Walk…and subsequent vigil. Since then, Steve has kindly posted a few of my border related stories as a guest columnist. Our relationship has now taken a more tightly woven course.

As of today, on the Rio Grande Guardian’s anniversary launch, the RGG has given me my own weekly column entitled…Inside the Checkpoints. Here is my first in a series of articles that give voice to those of us who live in the only militarized zone in America.

In future articles we will look very acutely at the life and the lives along the Texas Mexico border. If anyone feels that there is a perspective or issue that is being neglected…or that the public needs to be aware of…let’s talk! Most of you who know me…already know that I don’t care a lot about protocol. Fear and intimidation have no hold on what I say or don’t say. I believe that…while we still have a chance…we should say it like it is. Freedom is like a muscle. Use it or suffer atrophy. And this also applies. “No pain…no gain”.

We will feature our border assets and deficits. We will highlight our strengths and weakness. We will always oppose the wall. With great pride, will illuminate our special geography and culture. We’ll be fearless in dealing with the dark side. So…if you want an issue dealt with…that you might even feel is slighted or overlooked by the media…feel free to contact me personally.

We will welcome advertisers and sponsors to this page. That will help the Rio Grande Guardian to be a free news and opinion source.

Welcome…and enjoy…

Jay

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Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

jay@villadelrio.com

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / OpEdNews

In Operation Jump Start, the National Guard is engaging in a federal mission of law enforcement and anti-terrorism that under the Posse Comitatus Act would require authorization by Congress, if we had a Congress capable of saying anything in the face of escalating militarism except “more.”
Today’s hearing in Laredo, for example, will be structured by its Congressional organizers to legitimize further militarization of the border, especially under the alibi of anti-terrorism. Of course, when the feds put their boots down to protect us from terrorism, they are carrying a rationale that would seem impossible to disprove, but we ought to be able to disprove one thing by now: you don’t fight terrorism with an Army.

Remember the argument that some of us were making during the frozen autumn of 2001? A terrorism network is an organized crime, and if you want to fight organized crime in your neighborhood, you don’t militarize the streets, instead you work on intelligence and precisely-targeted law enforcement. If we were called loony in 2001, what does the evidence now show?

According to the Congressional leadership in Laredo today, the evidence shows that Al Qaeda could be crossing the border at the Rio Grande. And once again, they say, give us more military boots, and we’ll kick back the terrorist threat once and for all.

To begin with, let’s take the Congressional leadership at their word and suppose that Al Qaeda is preparing to exploit the Rio Grande as a place to enter the USA. Don’t we face the same question we faced prior to the militarization of Afghanistan? Is wholesale military deployment really the most effective way to identify, isolate, and prevent terrorist activity? Or would it be better to intensify intelligence and law enforcement related to actual terrorist cells?

As the Congressional leadership would have us believe, the most efficient way of protecting against incursions along the Rio Grande would be a regime of total surveillance and control of a geography. But this is the awful folly of the Bush war on terror and the lesson that Americans refuse to learn. So long as the people insist on a military-geographical model of anti-terrorism (Afghanistan, Iraq) rather than a network model (focused on actual terrorist cells, remember Tora Bora?) they will clamor for more safety in a way that guarantees only more state interference into their ordinary lives.

After five years of this gruesome nonsense, don’t we finally have enough evidence in hand to convince ourselves that the Bush war on terrorism is a model that in the name of anti-terrorism actually produces ever more unaccountable powers over the ordinary lives of non-terrorists the world over?

And haven’t we learned that the best way to isolate a terrorist is to make peace and civil justice?

Contrary to the lessons we have learned in the Bush war on terrorism, Operation Jump Start provides a bankrupt model of militarized, geographical lockdown that begins to get citizens of the USA used to the big lie, that anti-terrorism and military deterrence are natural born twins.

But we have been too charitable to the Congressional leadership by taking them at their word. If militarized geographical control is the best way to fight terrorist incursions, how do Congressional leaders explain their presence in Laredo today? Why are they not in Detroit? We ask the question not in order to shoo their posing pinstripes northward to inflict their stupidity on the people of Detroit, but in order to expose the double standard of their pretensions.

What the Bush war on terrorism accomplishes actually is a way of demonizing entire geographies for the purposes of war profiteering. As the model has worked pretty well against the vast, pan-Muslim world, so it will now be attempted in USA relations with Latin America, beginning where Latin America begins, north of the Rio Grande.

Scrolling through my friendly blog links I found this deep reflection from Scott Henson on the children of prisoners. It is well worth considering.

In the criminalizing trends of USA public policy over the past generation our images of prisoners tend to come at us in mug shots that isolate the face, the life, the consequence of incarceration.

But as Henson pleads for us to remember, the cost of prison is always more than the cost of the prisoner, because so many are moms and dads, too.

Henson’s story contributes fresh impressions for taking seriously our mutual responsibilities to decriminalize the USA, but quickly.

Link to the program that inspired Henson’s reflection.

PRESS RELEASE

AUSTIN, Texas – The archive of renowned feminist author, cultural theorist and independent scholar Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) has been acquired by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Anzaldúa archive contains manuscripts of the author’s major published works, including “Borderlands/La Frontera” and her “Prieta” stories, as well as unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, lectures, and audio and video interviews. In total, there is about 100 linear feet of material included in the archive.

Anzaldúa is widely recognized for her contributions to women’s and gender studies and Chicano culture and history. She was born on a ranch in the Valley region of South Texas where her family worked in agriculture, even following the migrant routes for a year. Anzaldúa experienced first-hand the hardships of the dispossessed Mexican American community along the border with Mexico, and was also confronted by traditional conservatism within that community as she developed her own lesbian identity. These struggles had a profound influence on the trajectory of her education and writing.

Anzaldúa graduated from Pan American University in 1969 and received a master’s degree in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 1972. She taught women’s studies, creative writing and third world women’s literature while working toward a doctor’s degree at the University of California – Santa Cruz, and lectured and taught at a number of colleges and universities, including San Francisco State University, Oaks College and Norwich University in Vermont. She also held the position of Distinguished Visiting Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of California – Santa Cruz.

Anzaldúa’s work has received significant critical acknowledgment for its singular voice and innovation and was especially praised for its scope and accessibility. She used her writing to explore her Chicana and lesbian identities and wrote as a feminist and woman of color. In the introduction to “Making Face, Making Soul” she wrote, “Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the worldŠ’Necesitamos teorías’ [we need theories] that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries – new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.”

At times, Anzaldúa’s discursive style put her at odds with formal academia. Her most famous work, “Borderlands/La Frontera,” is an autobiographical work that combines theory, personal introspection and poetry, a fusion that placed it in opposition to traditional academic precepts against mixing genres. Today “Borderlands” is widely read in college courses along with “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color,” which Anzaldúa co-edited with Cherrie Moraga. Both texts have been successful in bringing the voices of women of color into the mainstream feminist discourse.

“I feel profoundly honored and privileged to know that our university has acquired such a magnificent wealth of knowledge, a priceless contribution that will forever build bridges across many disciplines and areas of specialty, including but not limited to Mexican American, feminist and sexuality studies,” says Gloria González-López, assistant professor in the university’s Department of Sociology. “Beyond borders, the incalculable value of this acquisition will become a precious intellectual resource for all members of our local, national and international communities of academics, activists and artists. The irreplaceable presence of Gloria E. Anzaldúa will always be alive through the profound consciousness her courageous and ground-breaking intellectual work stimulated and transformed in the lives of countless members of our society.”

Anzaldúa’s papers will be processed over the next year by staff at the Benson with the help of the university’s Center for Mexican American Studies and will be completed and available for access to researchers in fall 2006.

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, a unit of the University of Texas Libraries, is a specialized research library focusing on materials from and about Latin America and on materials relating to Latinos in the United States. The collection contains nearly 900,000 books, periodicals and pamphlets, 2,500 linear feet of manuscripts, 19,000 maps, 21,000 microforms, 11,500 broadsides, 93,500 photographs and 38,000 items in a variety of other media.